Custom Work Aids for Distributed Command and Control Teams: A Key to Enabling Highly Effective Teams

Abstract : This paper presents an approach for designing information technology-based work aids to enable high work efficiency and effectiveness (E&E) for a distributed and networked command and control (C2) team. The authors believe this approach can be utilized to achieve these high-efficiency goals for other C2 teams as well. A common approach to supporting distributed teams is with general purpose collaboration tools (such as chat, whiteboards, file sharing, etc.). Because of the general nature of these tools and because they support only selected aspects of holistic work, the level of work efficiency that can be achieved by these means with teams in the C2 domain is limited. To achieve higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness, they believe holistic, coherent work aids tailored to the specific work of the team are necessary and can better enable Network Centric Warfare tenets. This paper presents an approach to scoping, analysis, and concept design aimed at achieving those objectives. It also provides an application example of the analysis and design of a demonstration concept developed to support a distributed team of 10 different C2 operators geographically distributed between two Air Operations Centers.