Enhancing Situational Awareness and Team Performance Using Network Centric Technologies

Abstract

A network-centric oriented technology that fused the User Defined Operational Picture (UDOP) and the Lightweight Collaborative Whiteboard (LCW) was compared to the baseline Global Command and Control System (GCCS). The UDOP environment allows the user to personally tailor the dynamic map and collaborate on the map via drawing, marking, and annotation that instantly appears on all other team member's maps. The GCCS map provides none of these capabilities. It was hypothesized that the UDOP environment will foster higher situational awareness and more adequate shared mental models than GCCS. Given that quality shared mental models and situational awareness have been associated with higher performance it was hypothesized that the UDOP environment would produce higher situational awareness and performance than the GCCS environment. Findings supported these hypotheses; higher situational awareness and performance were associated with the UDOP environment.