Low-Level Automation as a Pathway to Appropriate Trust in the PED Enterprise : Design of a Collaborative Work Environment

In Military Intelligence, Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (PED) functions are critical to success, providing capabilities that support intelligence request lifecycles. PED capabilities are becoming increasingly available to smaller, more centralized teams that support multiple battlespace operators. Lessons learned reveal that while existing PED processes provide detailed intelligence, operators are burdened with continual coordination, communication, and interpretation tasks that, coupled with the data volume generated by multi-INT ISR platforms, cause breakdowns in coordination and communication. These breakdowns result in failures to share, attend to, and interpret information critical to mission success. Key contributors to these breakdowns are the lack of automated support and cognitive incongruence between existing automated solutions and the support required by analysts, which reduce or destroy trust. Developers must recognize that system interactions that establish a human-machine dialogue are necessary to develop the trust required for automation’s successful adoption and employment. To overcome these challenges, we present a Collaborative Work Environment for PED operations. It includes decisioncentered analytics automation and low-level task automation designed to establish the human-machine dialogue that engenders trust. This approach facilitated appropriate attitudes of trust, leading analysts to request that we develop and deploy higher-level, planned automation capabilities to further offload PED tasks.