Innovative Information Technologies: Risk-Advised Information Management

"We will develop a comprehensive methodology, "Risk-Advised Information Management," to support multi-actor (social) choice applications. Well-founded principles from decision theory will be introduced to improve and coordinate decisions amongdecision-makers. We will show how the support offered by this methodology can be realized in technology, as an enhancement of K2 ("Knowledge Kinetics"), a very powerful information management and collaboration technology.Decision-makers will be able to quantify the value of differing kinds of information, and so sort through the vast available information resources. Decision-makers will also be able to advise, be advised by, and coordinate their decisions with otherdecision-makers. They will discover opportunities and conflicts among their decisions through analytic calculations on those decisions. By quantifying the rewards and risks associated with these, they will receive support for choices about who tocoordinate with, when, and over what topics. Hence two critical challenges to decision-making, information overload and coordination management, are addressed by creating formally-grounded tools to improve choice processes and decision contents. This isthe basis for a major improvement in decision quality, especially, for joint and combined/coalition operations. Defense, public-sector, and private-sector activities are becoming more complex, and increasingly inter-dependent in their execution.