The goal of the FY04 Air Force Mission Oriented Investigation and Experimentation (MOIE), "Improving Time-Sensitive Team Decision Making," was to study teams of operators in realistic time-sensitive venues. We sought to understand the kinds of tasks and functions people perform in these collaborative environments, why the tasks are so challenging, how they are currently done, and how to better support team performance. This paper describes a framework, developed as part of this research effort, to guide observation and analysis of team performance data.
In complex military domains such as Time Sensitive Targeting, human performance, the effectiveness of supporting systems, and the decision-making environment are strongly interdependent. To develop robust insights and findings for these domains, we advocate an overarching system perspective, where "the system" of interest encompasses the team of operators, the full set of information technologies and tools they use, and the decision-making environment that affects them. A primary purpose of the proposed "Interdependent Team, Systems, and Environment" (ITSE) Framework is to make explicit that team decision making and other collaborative behavior cannot be characterized in isolation, but rather occur with the support (or hindrance) of tools and as influenced by important tasks, goals, and constraints in the decision-making environment. The same supporting technologies may be used differently by different teams, on different collaborative tasks, and in different contexts.
This paper describes the framework, depicted as three overlapping circles representing the broad components of Team, Systems, and Environment. A box pointing to the intersection of those components depicts data recommended for comprehensive analysis. The paper describes each component, followed by discussion of complexities created from interactions and interdependencies among them and the implications for team performance.
Lastly, the paper describes the complementary types of data (direct observation, chat logs, and interviews) that were used by the MOIE research team to analyze collaboration in time-sensitive environments. A matrix summarizes desired characteristics of these data and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each; a combination of these three types of data can address the desired characteristics and capture many of the Team, Systems and Environment interdependencies put forth in the ITSE framework.
