Extraordinary situations, such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks, require massive relief operations from dispersed agencies. Collaboration between law enforcement, first responder teams and federal agencies is critical for identifying hazards and hostile persons – and ensuring that medical and emergency help arrives when and where it is needed. To prevent further problems, intelligence agencies need to collect highly dispersed data and be able to integrate information between agencies and across data sources to understand potential attacks.

In complex, distributed collaboration efforts, successful team performance is dependent on team members being able to continuously seek out new information, integrate the data with existing information and share this information with team members who are geographically dispersed. 

To work efficiently and effectively, distributed teams need collaboration tools and systems to exchange the information. However, a single type of collaboration tool may not be suited to all needs. Each team member will have different physical vantage points, goal orientations and terminology that require support. In most instances, tools must be tailored to the individual users to avoid overload.

Voice communication, instant messaging, domain-specific tools, GIS data and the Internet are just a few of the collaboration tools and techniques that can be used to connect multiple relief and governmental organizations and deliver the high levels of shared situation awareness needed in times of local, national and international distress.

Situation awareness design principles and training programs can deliver high levels of SA to teams involved in these challenging environments.

Contact us today to learn more about SA in the Homeland Defense Industry