Collaboration Technology in Military Operations: Lessons Learned from the Corporate Domain PDF Download

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Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Book Description
Collaboration technologies used in current military operations, such as email, instant messaging, and desktop conferencing, assist explicit communications between distributed team members. However, research in corporate environments has shown that explicit communication, while an important aspect of collaboration, is often used together with more subtle interactions to help teams communicate and coordinate their joint work. For example, monitoring other team members' on-going task activities help teams integrate related task activities, identify appropriate interruption opportunities, and provide assistance when necessary. When physically distributed, as is often the case in command and control environments, it is difficult to engage such subtle behaviors because team members' activities are not visibly accessible. Instead, people must resort to explicit methods, such as asking for a status update. These explicit methods require effort from both parties and can be disruptive. To address these issues in corporate work settings, collaboration technologies have been developed to help people remain apprised of remote colleagues' activities, while minimizing disruption. This paper examines the suitability of these corporate technologies for supporting military team interactions, with a focus on identifying aspects of military teamwork that are well supported by these approaches and aspects requiring new methods.