C4i in the Emergency Services

What is this report about?

This report presents results and analysis of field studies of distributed activity in the emergency services.

What problem does the report address?

Future military operations may involve operations other than war (OOTW), some of which might be analogous to the activity of Police or Fire services. Social Network Analysis provides a means of analysing the interactions with systems, and is applied to field studies of emergency service operations. The analysis is supplemented by consideration of distributed situation awareness and operational loading.

What is the benefit of this work?

The report provides metrics that can be used to study the operation of networked systems.

Who should take note of it?

Anyone whose work involves Network Enabled Capability.

What is the report's status?

MoD Cleared.

What are the main issues addressed in the report?

The issues addressed in this research programme were:

Social Network Analysis
The definition and measurement of distributed situation (shared) awareness
The use of a triangulated analysis to combine data from different observation methods

What are the findings?

The main conclusions were:

The manner in which different network configurations influence system performance
Shared awareness can be modelled and shown to change across agents and phases of an incident

What is recommended?

Further work into the relationship between network configuration and performance.
Development of software tool (WESTT – see HFI/ DTC /WP1.2)

Why bother?

The problem how to define and measure ‘network' performance is currently a moot point. Taking a socio-technical perspective provides an opportunity to consider a network as a social structure.