Collaborative Technology Tools for Quick Response Teams

Collaboration tools have proliferated across both commercial and military enterprises with the intuitive assumption that improved visualization and transfer of information and ideas can only help the decision making process. Further, many collaboration tool prototypes have been employed by operational forces with no hard metrics documenting improved team collaboration performance. An independent assessment is an essential component of the documentation of improved performance while performing common repeatable valid mission scenario(s) in a natural setting (outside Lab Environment). The assessment must consider team knowledge building, knowledge interoperability, state of situational awareness, and overall mission effectiveness. In addition, it must facilitate the collection of support metrics and system state, such as speed of decision cycle, required bandwidth, and data source connectivity.