A Conceptual Model of Organisational and Social Factors in Headquarters

Abstract

The potential of Information Age technology to support collaboration at a distance invites military forces to create agile mission groups, which can form, adapt and re-form rapidly and sympathetically to changing circumstances. Managing such an agile capability will require agile headquarters, as part of a wider Information Age Command and Control concept. This paper explores the implications of HQ agility from the stand-point of organizational and social science, and presents the results of thinking about how organizational and social factors can be integrated into modelling. The paper draws from social and organizational science literatures, C2 experimentation, and modelling research, to map out the key factors impacting on the relationship between capability investment and HQ performance and behavior. It outlines a revised conceptual model capable of addressing a requisite subset of variables and bringing them together into a coherent model implementation. The model requires a judicious synthesis of approaches, striking a practical balance between detailed and abstraction. The paper draws encouragement from existing model implementations, but the synthesis of a requisite model remains a challenging task. Success will allow analysis to support an integrated approach to investment in Network Enabled Capability (NEC). Failure has significant implications for acquisition justification and management.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA466666

Entities

People

  • Graham Mathieson
  • Lorraine Dodd

Organizations

  • Defence Science and Technology Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Case Studies
  • Cognition
  • Command And Control
  • Information Exchange
  • Information Processing
  • Information Systems
  • Military Organizations
  • Network Science
  • Operations Research
  • Personality
  • Psychology
  • Reliability
  • Social Networks
  • Social Sciences
  • Teamwork
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Joint Military Operations and Doctrine.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Fully Networked C3
  • Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control