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Featured in MITRE's Project Showcase
In response to a customer request for an update on surface-to-air missile deployment, the analyst searched several databases, viewed a number of images, and also contacted a researcher to examine several other sources. A fellow analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency made some key contributions as well. After assembling the information, the analyst obtained the usual approvals from various levels of management; at the last minute, the analyst bumped into a colleague in the hallway who suggested contacting a fellow analyst in the Navy for some key information. The analyst then completed the briefing and presented it to the customer.
"At first glance," observes Peter Spellman, MITRE principal engineer, "this seems pretty ordinary--people in industry, the government, and the military produce similar briefings every day. What is unique is the geography: the customer is in Korea, the analyst in Hawaii. The images and other information are in intelligence files in several different locations. The Defense Intelligence Agency analyst in Washington, DC, and the various levels of management are located throughout the US, Japan, and Europe. The colleague works at an office in South Carolina, and the Navy analyst is on a ship in the Mediterranean. The hallway where they bumped into each other isn't in any building--it doesn't exist at all, at least not in any physical sense--it exists only as part of the Collaborative Virtual Workspace."
The Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) is an office automation environment that enables people to converse, collaborate, and interact regardless of their geographic location. CVW establishes and manages a collection of persistent virtual rooms; each room incorporates the people, information, and tools appropriate to a task, operation, or service. CVW users can move from room to room just as they would in a building, meeting team members, discovering collaborators, entering group discussions, providing knowledge, seeking information, and performing all the other functions they normally would.
The need for CVW arose out of the changing circumstances provoked by the end of the Cold War. As the sole remaining superpower, the U.S. now has interests at stake in even more areas of an increasingly volatile and complex world. At the same time, the end of the Cold War has led to unprecedented budget constraints; these in turn have forced drastic personnel reductions and the radical consolidation of organizations and functions.
These factors have combined to require a shortening of timelines for decision making, a heightened demand for sharing assets, and an increase in coordination within the intelligence community. They have also focused new attention on the importance of team building and the flexible use of appropriately skilled personnel.
In response to this challenge, MITRE's Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems is helping national intelligence agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the military intelligence organizations develop a fundamentally new approach to producing and distributing intelligence information. CVW takes advantage of the latest computer and Internet technology to bring new flexibility to the intelligence and command and control processes.
CVW uses the latest computer and Internet technology to provide a seamless, single environment that integrates collaborative tools, such as text, audio and video conferencing, information sharing, whiteboarding, and joint document preparation. In addition, CVW can function as a framework to integrate current applications, enabling them to be used collaboratively. Since the CVW environment and all it contains are persistent, collaboration can occur continuously from one session to another and from one topic to another as individual users move from room to room.
MITRE anticipated the need for such tools in applications ranging from mission planning to intelligence imagery analysis, and has been working on collaborative computing for several years. "In 1994, we took a fresh look at the future work place, specifically addressing how people would conduct work and collaborate," recalls Spellman. "The technical challenge was to provide an environment that accommodated anyone, at anytime, in any location, working on any machine, and using any communications. We surveyed the collaborative tool offerings on the market and in the offing from vendors, and found a complete lack of such environments."
"At the time, there were products available to solve discrete collaborative problems, such as document sharing, application sharing, whiteboarding, and video teleconferencing," Spellman continues. "While standards were in the works, the tools themselves were not interoperable with one another--each of them supported a different mode of collaborating, a differing operating environment, and a different user interface, making it difficult or even impossible to set up collaborative sessions."
"But the most serious omission was the lack of persistence, the ability to retain continuity," observes Spellman. "Once a collaborative session was over, everything, all the work, all the resources, all the links, all the addresses, simply disappeared."
CVW overcomes this limitation by requiring no prior set-up of each collaborative session, allowing continuous collaboration from one session to another. "People remain logged in to the system regardless of which topic they're working on or which room they are working in," notes Esther Rhode, MITRE principal staff. "In addition, the system provides location independence--users have access from anywhere on the network, not just from their own desktop."
"They also have location transparency," Rhode continues. "Where a user logs in from is completely immaterial to how the system operates. The only limitation is bandwidth availability, which governs the number of features a user can employ."
Collaboration is a uniquely human activity, and CVW preserves the human element critical to the success of any such computer-based system. CVW mimics the semantics of the physical world as closely as possible, giving users the illusion of physical space that permits natural social behavior to occur. The only break in the physical metaphor is when something is deemed particularly useful, such as the introduction of a proxy (a replica of an individual user), which allows a person to collaborate in two places at the same time.
"The system actually allows for chance encounters when moving from room to room," observes Rhode. "Just as in a real building, you can bump into someone in the hallway and get to talking; as with a face-to-face meeting, this sometimes leads nowhere, but other times provides the key ingredient in solving a problem."
MITRE has developed a CVW prototype to demonstrate the system's applicability and usefulness. A number of detailed demonstrations have convinced our customers of the potential of the system to better accomplish their missions; based on these demonstrations, several customers have asked to have CVW deployed as an experimental pilot to various organizations within the intelligence community and the military; these prototypes are assisting our customers in a variety of applications, from conducting current operations to the formulation of future warfighting concepts.
"As our customers gain more experience with CVW, their initial feedback indicates that the system yields immediate benefits for collaboration," remarks Lucy Deus, MITRE lead engineer. "It also stimulates thinking on potentially far-reaching effects on the future workplace." Geographically distributed teams were more efficient since members were able to share resources and communicate more effectively; in addition, the system enabled team members to form the interpersonal relationships critical to effective teams.
"The ease with which team members can share resources has led to shifts in thinking about the underlying processes of an organization and inter-organizational interactions to achieve higher productivity, efficiency, quality and responsiveness to their customer base," observes Spellman. "In addition, the system made it far easier to capture interaction between participants, documentation, and information relevant to a specific crisis or team effort for later analysis, helping to understand the process as well as the function and effectiveness of tools used to gain insight into successes and failures."
"We are continuing to develop CVW to add new capabilities in response to our customers' needs," remarks MITRE Lead Engineer John Kordash. "For example, further research will extend the mobility of CVW through the increased use of wireless communications. We have implemented an initial Java-based CVW capability in our drive to achieve platform independence and provide CVW access from a Web browser. In addition, new server-to-server communication will expand the ability to travel from one virtual workplace to another."
"Due to overwhelming enthusiasm and urging from our customers," Rhode continues, "we are moving CVW into the commercial sector so that vendors can begin producing the appropriate components. To that end, we have begun to aggressively pursue discussions with interested vendors, and have provided detailed demonstrations of CVW in operation."
"We are also investigating the application of CVW to different mission areas," remarks Rhode. "These missions include counter-proliferation and counter-narcotics efforts, battle management, doctrine development, command and control, mission planning, and information warfare."
Many questions about the effectiveness and efficient use of collaborative environments remain; MITRE is currently investigating issues such as organizational motivators for collaboration, team building, privacy, security, and individual interaction. "We are continuing to investigate innovative means of promoting teaming and collaboration," concludes Spellman, "in our drive to help improve productivity even in the face of shrinking resources."
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