Co-operative decision making and team work in command and control: how can computers help and how do they get in the way?

Computer based command and control and incident management systems are becoming more widespread and more powerful. The design drivers are faster response to more data with fewer people. The need for `distributed teams´ is emerging. However, there is limited experience of building systems that will deliver. This paper gives examples from a number of applications on ways that computer based systems can help and identifies some of the problems that have been found to date. The role of recent research into naturalistic decision making and group decision support is discussed