Knowledge Management and Collaboration in an Effects-Based Operations Environment

New warfighting concepts are currently under development to improve the ability of future Joint Force Commanders (JFCOM) to rapidly and decisively conduct particularly challenging and important operational missions as they transition to the fighting force described in Joint Vision 2020. This paper describes one element that is part of these new concepts: knowledge management and collaboration as conducted to support Effects-Based Operations (EBO). Collaboration offers great potential to better enable warfighters to plan, monitor, execute, and assess activities across the spectrum of joint functional areas. Collaboration also is essential to develop a shared situational awareness among heterogeneous, distributed team members. EBO is defined as a process for obtaining a desired strategic outcome, or 'effect' on the enemy, through the synergistic and cumulative application of the full range of national (military and nonmilitary) capabilities at all levels of conflict. An experiment entitled Effects Tasking Order-to-Actions Limited Objective Experiment (ETO-to-Actions LOE), was conducted at the JFCOM, Joint Experimentation Center, Suffolk, VA, 3-14 December, 2001, to examine aspects of EBO, and to specifically assess and refine the effects-based planning and assessment (EBP&A) process. Three surveys were administered during the experiment to gather data on the effectiveness of the following: (1) the collaborative tools and the training provided to the participants for this experiment, (2) knowledge management and collaboration as critical aspects of effects-based planning, and (3) the EBP&A process. This paper describes the results of a subset of the knowledge management and collaboration survey, which included 29 items that participants rated using a 5-point Likert scale. This is a companion paper to two other papers that discuss the results of the other two surveys that were administered. Prepared in cooperation with Jaycor, Defense Systems Group. Presented at the Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (CCRTS) (2002) held on 11-13 Jun at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. The original document contains color images.