Abstract. Before modernizing any information-intensive system, it is important to understand
how people are performing their jobs using that system. This
understanding is built not simply by observing what people are
doing, but by digging into how people think about their
jobs, what coordination they need to do, and the dependencies
among subtasks that together dictate a workflow. Building a thorough
understanding of complex tasks takes weeks or months rather than
days, but we needed to get as much of an
understanding as possible in three days of a real-time command
and control center for military unmanned vehicles. To help structure
our investigation, we used a technique called Applied Cognitive Task
Analysis (ACTA) [14]. To the best of our knowledge, ours
is the first use of ACTA to study a military
command and control center in such a time-compressed fashion. We
describe our application of ACTA and the types of recommendations
we were able to generate from our analysis, and provide
reflections on the study process. Another contribution of this paper
is based on the fact that we were able to
gain access to a facility that is not usually open
to researchers; hence the ACTA results may be of interest
to those who would benefit from knowing about the major
cognitive challenges facing members of the Predator Unmanned Aircraft System
community.
Related topics:
C2, Command and Control, command systems
View first page of "Drury: A "Thin-Slicing" Approach to Understanding Cognitive Challenges in Real-Time Command and Control"
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