At this year's International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium a new striking theme was positioned by Dr. David S. Alberts.
Dr. Albert's presented the case to the audience for a new way to communicate so that we may achieve agility through focus and convergence without the constraints of traditional concepts and practices. While Dr Albert's believes "Traditional approaches to C2 can, in certain situations and circumstances, achieve adequate Focus & Convergence" he stated that there is an urgent need for new approaches to C2 and we should try and to utilize a new approach to achieve focus and convergence with the requisite agility? He asked:
- How do the participants-allocate decision rights?
- Disseminate information?
- Interact with one another?.
Agility enabled transformed operations require edge organisations with broad dissemination of information, peer to peer communication and a fully distributed pattern of interaction. In that respect shared situational awareness enables collaboration and self synchronization.
However, I think we need to move this approach further and ask what enablers are available today that can be implemented to achieve agility by moving to an edge organization? These enablers are technology and processes. An edge organisation has a distribution of responsibilities to the edges but must ensure that needed information is broadly accessible and gives all participants the power to shape their information positions and awareness including Intent is to be broadly shared. Agility the edge organisation to provide the user of the information grid to pull / to select what information should be included in or excluded from the data set defining the operational picture at the source ( system of record ). He than also defines what he wants to share.
As a first step I believe resource management & battle management need to converge to provide a common view of force capabilities which in turn can shorten the decision cycle.
In a paper David Lincourt and myself wrote titled "Enterprise SOAs for the convergence of Battle Management and Resource Management systems", we shared how this may become possible from a process and technology point of view. ( link for presentation )
In every day life convergence happens every where but goes more or less unnoticed. Only when we look back do we see that convergence took place. Today we take advantage of new technologies like Skype to call from one continent to another continent, hear our favorite radio station at remote locations via the internet or watch podcasts. Phones, computers and TV converge on our laptop. http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/bpx-defense
