Tailoring an electronic meeting system to military planning and operations: a case study

In the fall of 1998, the Army Research Laboratory started a science and technology objective entitled, "Collaborative Technology for the Warfighter." Later, the Battle Command Battle Laboratory at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was added as a partner to provide operational expertise and as a test site for a major component, the automation of the military decision-making process utilizing group support system software. Since the partnership was joined, there have been several limited experiments performed with mixed but mostly favorable results. Of those experiments, the first large-scale examination using commercial group support system software to perform military planning and operations occurred during an exercise called, "Prairie Warrior." The observations, comments and lessons learned from that exercise are the basis for this paper - a case study. More importantly, examples are provided showing the desired enhancements brought out by using the current version group decision software during the exercise can be fulfilled by using the next generation group decision support environment, "Cognito".