ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ways of automatically assessing situation awareness of large organizations using converging, complementary communications assessment methods. Modern networked information systems support synchronous and asynchronous communication among globally distributed team members via telephone, e-mail, instant messaging and text chat rooms, making possible the coordination of activities that would have been impossible or impractical in the past. The Department of Defense uses networked collaboration technologies to coordinate distributed, heterogeneous forces for both wartime and peacetime activities. Department of Defense has increased funding to develop common operating picture displays, collaborative environments and communication tools, explicitly to improve situation awareness. The macrocognition theory of Warner et al. was developed primarily to explain the behaviors of teams. The analyses performed for this project concerned a very large organization, one several orders of magnitude greater in size and perhaps in task complexity that teams.
