Cognitive-Based Metrics to Evaluate Collaboration Effectiveness
Abstract
Effective collaboration within culturally diverse multinational coalitions is essential in many military operations, especially in Operations Other Than War (OOTW). Unfortunately, effective collaboration is sometimes difficult to achieve within any collaboration team. Because methods to improve collaboration, including selecting the right team members, creating the right type of organization, providing the right kind of training, and selecting the right types of collaboration tools are not fully understood, identifying effective interventions requires experimentation. Metrics, and especially cognitive-oriented metrics that focus on team member understandings, are critical to such experimentation. Such cognitive-focused metrics can measure not only whether particular interventions are improving team effectiveness, but also can illuminate the cognitive reasons for the improvement. This paper reports on a three-year research effort to develop, test, and apply such metrics. It describes a model-based strategy for selecting metrics, several models useful for metrics generation, eight classes of metrics for measuring collaboration effectiveness and the factors that contribute to this effectiveness, and the results of two metrics evaluations that demonstrate the practicality of applying the metrics in military experiments. Five different collaboration models have contributed to the development of the cognitive-focused collaboration metrics: teamwork/taskwork model, planning/execution feedback model, individual-team interplay model, cognition-behavior-product model, and the transactive memory model. The handling of human and organizational issues, scenario development, selection of metrics, and use of models follows the recommendations of the Code of Best Practice. The paper is followed by 28 briefing charts that summarize the presentation. (6 tables, 6 figures, 7 refs.)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2003
- Accession Number
- ADA425450
Entities
People
- David Noble
- Michael Letsky