Silver Command Acceleration: Report on Laboratory and Field Studies

Abstract

During the latter part of 2005 the HFI DTC had additional funding made available to accelerate a number of areas of investigation. Brunel University were given four main areas of work all of which were concerned with developing and testing a form of intermediate level Command System, so called ‘Silver Command’. Conceptually, three broad levels of command have been defined: Gold, Silver and Bronze. Gold command is embodied by the Knowledge Wall system installed in Brunel University’s BIT Lab, Bronze Command is the type of technology developed for personnel in the field, whereas Silver Command is the layer in between. This report describes the output of this acceleration work in respect to a range of mini studies carried out in parallel to the requirements specification (WP 10.2.1) and design (WP 10.2.2) of a Modified Off The Shelf (MOTS) Silver Command solution.

The analysis is couched at an exploratory and for the main part descriptive level of analysis. This arose out of time based constraints (sequential work streams being compressed into parallel work streams), a desire for an evidence based approach to the design and specification of the prototype system (the empirical findings contributing directly to the prototype) and a more fundamental desire to provide value for money. To this end a range of mini-studies were designed and undertaken. The broad empirical themes that emerged are as follows:

1. System characteristics (related to the way in which information is presented) had the greatest effect on the measure of task completion time (as opposed to accuracy).
2. Findings for task accuracy are somewhat mixed. In some cases all levels of the independent variable(s) were able to facilitate 100% accuracy, but not others (as low as 12.5% accuracy was achieved in some instances). A time/accuracy trade off also became apparent under certain experimental conditions.
3. The clearest finding, given that the remit of these studies was to be able to detect major issues in the requirements specification and prototyping stages of Silver Command System development, is that the Commercial and Modified Off-The-Shelf (COTS/MOTS) systems are not significantly underperforming compared to a Bespoke system. Furthermore, substantial improvements were observed when participants used the COTS/MOTS systems that were not similarly in evidence for the Bespoke system.

In conclusion, the use of a COTS/MOTS approach is justified on empirical grounds, a range of initial findings have been derived, further hypotheses developed and new experimental protocols trialled.

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