BACKGROUND
The
Timely and successful resolution of such crises
depends on civilian and military cooperation and coordination, with the military
often serving in a supporting role.
Civilian participants range from multiple
A September 1998 National Defense University (NDU)
conference concluded that the success of future civil-military exercises will
depend on three pivotal factors: the
unity of effort among civilian and military participants, education concerning
the distinctive challenges presented by these missions, and adequate resource
allocation. Amb. Robert Oakley (ret.) said, “The indisputable fact is that
mission success [for these civil-military exercises] depends upon combining
military and civilian knowledge, skills, and capabilities …”[2]
Process, politics, and culture, however, are among
the many obstacles to unity of effort.
No single organization is responsible for coordinating the efforts of
all civilian and military organizations: thus consensus and collaboration are
required. Although the military and
other USG agencies are directed to respond to a crisis, IOs and NGOs
participate on a voluntary basis.
Furthermore, few processes or robust tools are in place to facilitate
the sharing of information or to build on lessons learned. Every organization - both within the USG and
outside it - has its own unique politics, culture, and reward system. Training can help overcome these obstacles
but many organizations have insufficient resources and many also place little
value on training – opting for experience-based, “on the job” training. Participants in coalitions of the willing[3]
often have not trained together and are unfamiliar with each other’s
capabilities and cultures.
This paper proposes one solution to help develop
civil-military unity of effort using new information technologies: the
development of an Internet-based, Crisis Planning and Response (CPR) Portal
that would combine crisis planning and response-related content, curriculum,
and collaboration tools, providing a bridge among civil, military, and
international organizations.
TRAINING AND EDUCATION WITH THE CPR PORTAL
This section presents a hypothetical example of how
the proposed CPR portal might be used.
Cathy is a USG official, formerly with a regional
bureau and now in a policy position. The
government agency for which Cathy works supports a number of Presidential
Decision Directives (PDDs), including PDD 56[4]. Her boss informs her that, should an
impending overseas crisis intensify, the US National Security Council likely
will invoke PDD 56 and she will be in charge of coordinating her agency’s role in
the collaboratively-developed USG political-military plan. With her background in regional affairs,
Cathy is unfamiliar with PDD 56 and must get up to speed quickly.
Cathy opens her Web browser and types in the CPR
portal’s web site. Since this is Cathy’s
first visit to the site, she has the opportunity to customize it with the
information of most interest to her. She
makes content selections from a series of menus – selecting information related
to PDD 56, the area where the crisis is occurring, and lessons learned from
similar complex contingencies.
When Cathy’s customized version of the CPR portal is
displayed, she opens and reviews an unclassified version of PDD 56 in the
Reference section. Because this document
is linked to an outline of the political-military plan, it helps her better
understand which sections she’ll be required to write should PDD 56 in fact be
invoked.
Cathy locates background information on the current
deteriorating situation and quickly realizes that the situation appears to be
very similar to a past humanitarian crisis.
With this in mind, Cathy visits the CPR portal’s Lessons Learned
section, opens a page linking her to the previous crisis, and studies it to
learn more about the conditions that hindered an effective response and the
lessons learned from it.
Although Cathy already has received some valuable
information, she believes she needs more training to better prepare for and
respond to the potential crisis.
Reviewing the calendar in the CPR portal’s Training and Education
section, she sees that the next face-to-face session will be held in Summer
2001 – too late for her immediate needs.
However, the Training and Education section does provide a link to a
distance learning course. Cathy
immediately begins a self-paced multimedia lesson that allows her to access an
instructor from a remote location.
Later, Cathy signs up for a collaborative
experiential training session sponsored and planned by an IO; Cathy will serve
as her agency’s representative. Other
USG officials and relief community participants will train together with
role-players filling in for any missing participants and acting as the next
higher level of officials organizing the political-military plan
development. The participants join the
session from multiple geographic locations and interact using
video-teleconferencing (VTC), text chat, and email. They iterate over sections of the plan,
sharing those sections with each other and using the portal web site as a
shared file space.
The CPR portal, in short, has allowed Cathy to study
the PDD, review details of the impending crisis and relevant prior crises, and
receive necessary training and education without leaving her desk. She also has met other members of the virtual
community and started becoming part of that community.
AN INTRODUCTION TO PORTALS
As web sites became ubiquitous, it was inevitable
that collections of web sites, or portals, would emerge, freeing Internet
visitors of the obligation to identify, locate, and sequentially visit a series
of web sites of interest simply to access a few relevant items of information
on each. Portals present links to a
collection of sites of interest to their respective communities. While the best known portals – e.g., Yahoo
and Lycos – have been created to have nearly universal appeal, most portals
serve far narrower audiences: universities, schools, businesses and the
like. Your alma mater’s portal, for
instance, will allow you to locate former classmates or alums sharing common
interests or professional backgrounds.
In turn, it will allow you to interact with old or new acquaintances in
a shared virtual space.
Portals combine content from multiple locations and
generally are integrated with tools. Of
the portal characteristics listed below, the first three characteristics
distinguish portals from web sites (though a portal might not have all three)
and the last two are typical of most web sites and portals alike. Portals:
- Gather content from multiple locations. Web sites typically feature their own
content; portals collect content from many different organizations or
sites.
- Filter and customize content.
This is typically done explicitly – the user chooses categories of
information he or she wants to see from a menu but this also can be done implicitly
by tracking user behavior (what parts of the site the user visits and/or
items he or she purchases).
- Integrate tools. Most
portals integrate tools into the site.
The type of tool depends on the portal type. Most portals include search engines. Business-to-business and general
shopping sites will include an e-commerce capability; specialized portals
include more sophisticated software (e.g., homebid.com includes
transaction-management software to automate the paper process of buying a
home, integrating bankers, brokers, attorneys, real estate agents, and
buyers online). Portals also are
likely to include community-building tools (see below).
- Serve a target audience.
Although general-purpose portals are designed to attract any
Internet user, most portals aim for narrower audiences, examples of which
will be discussed in the following section.
- Promote a sense of community among users. In addition to having content focused at
a particular population, portals typically include collaboration tools to
help users identify and interact with each other through text chat,
bulletin boards of archived email, and ratings or evaluations of users
(also known as reputation managers).
…Applied to the World Wide Web, the related term
portal originally referred to the visitor’s starting place on the
Internet. Now it’s a buzzword given to
wider application. “The first
all-purpose portals were established by Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos,” Don Dea,
cofounder, Fusion Productions, Webster, New York, explained in a recent
presentation…. These jumping-off spots
began as simple search engines for guiding you around the Internet. “They’ve since evolved,” says Dea, “to a
horizontal dimension that provides an organized desktop view of a wide variety
of information, news, and e-commerce options, filtering in the good stuff from
the mass of information online.” (Schweitzer, 2000)
As portals have evolved, they’re becoming more
differentiated, varying in target audience scope, breadth of available
information, and the degree of customization.
Some basic portal types are described below. For a more detailed discussion of portal
types, see (CAP Ventures, 2000).
General-purpose portals. These are designed to serve as a user’s gateway to
the Internet. They feature current news,
sports stories, stock quotes, weather, etc., include a search engine, and are
supported by advertising. See Excite
<http://www.excite.com>, Lycos <http://www.lycos.com>, or Yahoo
<http://www.yahoo.com>. These sites also allow users to create
customized versions of the portal page by selecting specific categories of
information desired: categories of news, a horoscope, or stocks to be
tracked. They allow such details as page
color to be customized as well, while helping users interact with others
through chat, games, and personal ads.
Examples include: <http://my.yahoo.com>
shown in Figure 1, <http://my.lycos.com>,
and <http://my.excite.com>.
DefenseLink is one example of a general-purpose
military or defense-related portal, providing access to all online DOD
component information and defense news. “…Links are also available to: all
official Defense news releases and photos; a selection of frequently asked
questions; major publications such as Defense Issues and the Quadrennial
Defense Review; the Guide to Defense Organization and Functions; and a wide
selection of material of general and historical interest.” <http://www.defenselink.mil> This portal offers extensive content but few
tools, no personalization, and no advertising.
Figure 1. A
sample customized My Yahoo page
Umbrella or library portals. These portals provide access to their collections
of materials. ZDNet <http://www.zdnet.com>, Ziff Davis Media
Publications’ computer technology portal, incorporates online versions of its
technology publications: Computer Gaming World, eWeek, FamilyPC, Inter@ctive Week, Macworld, PC Magazine, Sm@rt Partner, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Ziff Davis
Smart Business. To promote community,
readers can add comments on each article and look for jobs. An e-commerce capability allows users to buy
various products profiled in any given article.
ZDNet also has added a general purpose portal component: horoscope,
general news, and computer news, with the ability to choose which sections are
presented in what order.
E-commerce portals. Other portals provide access to e-commerce,
e.g., Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com,
which allows users to buy books, movies, and CDs, shop in an online mall, and
buy items at auction. Amazon.com’s site
provides a very interesting case study in customization as it actually
identifies books or other products a user might like, based on users’
preferences. But how does it determine
user tastes? Some of Amazon.com’s
personalization of the site is based on users’ own explicit feedback, i.e.,
ratings of books they have read. Some
personalization is based on implicit feedback: by tracking user purchases as a
good substitute for explicit feedback (users willing to spend money on a
product generally would rate it highly).
Amazon.com also provides recommendations without requiring user feedback
by identifying other books that were purchased by buyers of the book the user
is considering.
Community portals. It can be a little tricky defining this
category precisely. These portals
provide useful services to a specific community in order to promote the group’s
sense of affinity (and interest in the portal).
Such portals often incorporate a significant e-commerce component –
after all, someone has to pay for these web sites! <http://www.workingfamilies.com> is for
AFL-CIO members and families (and exclusively sells products made by union
companies).
LIFELines <http://www.lifelines4qol.org/> is a
community portal devoted to quality of life issues for Navy and Marine Corps
active duty and reserve personnel, retirees, and their families. Users can find information on everything from
increased opportunities for sailors to pursue college degrees while in service,
to “Great Date Ideas for Every Pay Grade” for the single sailor, to information
on medical and dental services. Navy
officials’ video and audio broadcasts can be found here and played on demand. Personalization is limited to by-name greetings
of users and summaries of their visits to the site. No tools are provided to facilitate
interactions with other users.
Military and commercial portal sites alike feature
information of impressive quality in substantial depth while differing in customization
levels and tools provided. Unlike
military sites, commercial portals are supported by advertising and excel at
supporting interaction among users and customization.
THE PROPOSED CPR PORTAL
This paper proposes the creation of a portal focused
on the needs of the community of people who plan for and respond to (primarily)
foreign crises. This community is
scattered among many organizations, from large IOs like the UN to small NGOs,
across a broad range of countries, and within the USG, across a diverse set of
agencies and organizations within agencies.
As mentioned earlier, these organizations reflect a very broad spectrum
of cultures and attitudes toward planning, collaboration, information-sharing,
training, and experience (from senior officials to personnel participating in
crisis planning or response for the first time).
A portal will help build bridges among these diverse
organizations and personnel through information-sharing, online training and
education, and collaboration tools.
Given the Internet’s pervasive reach, these capabilities can be accessed
24/7 virtually anywhere in the world, thereby allowing geographically
distributed users to communicate with each other, train together, and work
together across time and distance. This
will be particularly useful to people in more remote regions of the world as
wireless Internet access becomes more prevalent.
Among the established crisis planning and response
community portals are:
The Red River Basin Disaster Information Network
(“Shared Tools for Regional Problem-Solving”) <http://www.gdin.org>,
shown in Figure 2, operates in a manner similar to the proposed CPR portal but
is focused on a narrower audience: Red River Basin residents in North Dakota,
Minnesota, and Manitoba, Canada and Canadian and US federal and
provincial/state flood management organizations. Still under development, the portal provides
photo, text, and data information about the Basin and previous floods. It also provides tools allowing users to
identify and interact with each other via text chat. Decision support tools, e.g., flood
forecasting and emergency management tools, are being developed for the site.
Figure 2.
Main page for Red River Basin Disaster Information Network
ReliefWeb <http://www.relief.int>,
sponsored by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs and shown in Figure 3, is the largest crisis planning and response
portal. “ReliefWeb is the premier
global online source of information on natural disasters and complex
emergencies. The site [is] updated
around the clock to provide time-critical access to over 50,000 documents and
other reliable information on events as they unfold. Our aim is to strengthen the humanitarian
community’s capacity to respond to these emergencies.”[5] Usage peaks during such crises as the
devastating 1999 earthquake in Turkey, when the site registered more than
50,000 hits per day. ReliefWeb teams
select and post information from hundreds of sources, without alteration. In addition to near real-time news updates,
content includes background information, donor contributions and requests for
funding, maps, and a directory of humanitarian organizations.
Figure 3.
Main page for ReliefWeb
ReliefWeb – which excels in content but does not
support personalization - is not as extensive as the proposed CPR portal. It provides some listings of people, but
has no interactive communication or collaboration tools. The proposed CPR portal might be viewed as
adding a layer to ReliefWeb content, supporting users’ interactive training,
education, and collaboration.
The remainder of this section describes the proposed
CPR portal in greater detail.
Information-Sharing
A useful portal must include current, relevant
information concerning the domain of interest.
For the CPR portal, this includes: information about current and past
crises; lessons learned from prior crises; geographic information about
countries; maps; economic and political assessments; and information about the
capabilities of organizations who respond to crises. A commonplace lesson learned from military
training for operations other than war is that personnel have a difficult time
learning who the relevant players are and what their capabilities are. An important lesson from the US involvement
in Bosnia is that IOs and NGOs are critical to accomplishing the mission and
should be involved in planning as early as possible.[6] USG officials participating in PDD 56
training have echoed similar concerns about players and capabilities on a
different scale after learning new information about USG agency capabilities
and/or organizations (even within their own respective agencies) during that
training.
Much relevant information published by government
and private organizations is freely available through open sources. One major deficiency in this domain is the
lack of codified and shared lessons learned from prior crises: widespread
dissemination of and accessibility to this information via the Web would help
alleviate ignorance.
Customization
Through the use of user profile-based filters,
information can be selected and pushed to users. This has the potential to provide a greater
incidence of useful information than users would find independently (reflect
upon the most recent WWW search you conducted and the ratio of useful and
interesting results returned to uninteresting, unhelpful, and sometimes
downright bizarre results returned).
User profile-based filters can provide the information sought in a more
timely fashion, however, this is not a panacea.
Customization does not always work correctly or comprehensively; thus
this needs to be under the explicit control of the user.
User profiling uses explicit feedback allowing users
to decide what kinds of information to receive; other kinds of customization
can be performed via implicit feedback.
Just as Amazon.com identifies books purchased by others who bought a given
book, items (maps, documents, other web sites, etc.) related to a portal user’s
current page that have been most frequently accessed by other portal users can
be displayed.
Training and Education
The CPR portal should support passive, active, and
experiential learning. Although there is
no agreed-upon curriculum for this area, several organizations have developed
courses suited to their own requirements covering such topics as conflict
resolution, negotiation, and problem-solving.
These courses could be translated into robust multimedia educational
lessons. Given the sudden onset of many
crises, the ability to deliver on-demand distance learning education is
absolutely critical. To provide
experiential learning, better crisis simulations are needed (Loughran, Stahl,
Eisenhour, Hammel, & Marks, 1999).
For the time being, however role-playing is a more readily accessible
alternative to computer simulations.
Since crisis response generally involves many
diverse organizations, each with specialized skills, training is more realistic
when it also involves these organizations.
Providing training opportunities, via collaboration tools over the
Internet, helps overcome some of the obstacles to collocated training. Many private organizations do not have the
budget to offer training, other than the on-the-job variety, to their
employees. Oftentimes, USG officials
tasked to participate in US planning or response are new to the domain: when
responding to an immediate crisis, they can’t wait for the next training
session scheduled several months hence.
Online, on-demand training and education could help
overcome several obstacles for this domain.
Another issue, particularly prevalent among USG agencies, is the
perception that important officials are busy officials: in turn, anyone having
the time to attend training is not busy and therefore unimportant. It is not likely that any portal could
overcome this perspective.
Tools
Sharing information among diverse and geographically
distributed organizations is an important step towards developing cooperation,
and one which ReliefWeb already has achieved.
However, providing tools to help people identify one another and
collaborate requires a deeper and more meaningful level of integration.
“Coming together
is a beginning; keeping together is progress, working together is success,” Henry Ford.
The same technologies used to find and filter
information resources can link people who share complementary backgrounds
and/or interests. For instance, a person
new to earthquake disaster relief could meet people by visiting the site’s
earthquake disaster relief bulletin board.
They also could post questions on the bulletin board or initiate and run
a query asking which CPR users have experience with earthquake relief.
Collaboration and process management tools allow
people to work together in virtual teams.
Virtual teams, small groups of people working together while
geographically separated, are an integral part of today’s society. The commercial world uses virtual teams to
provide nearly continuous coverage on projects, most notably in automobile and
airplane design and development. The
military is using virtual teams to allow specialized groups from multiple
locations work together.
Today’s networked information technologies offer a
plethora of collaboration options: VTC, text chat, and application sharing, web
sites, packaged groupware programs, and data downloaded to wireless
devices.
Collaboration tools can be combined with training
content and role players (vice actual participants in every capacity) to
provide complex, richly detailed scenarios that are realistic and
demanding. ThoughtLink undertook an
experiment to evaluate the use of such a system for training PDD 56. In the experiment, one group of USG
officials, working from offices and homes, used a web site with appropriate
content and integrated collaboration tools (email, text chat, persistent
workspace), in concert with short face-to-face meetings, to develop a USG
political-military plan to respond to a hypothetical political and social
crisis overseas. Results indicate that
the distributed group spent quite a lot of time on the plan and produced a
high-quality plan, however, its overall satisfaction was somewhat lower than
that of a similar but collocated group that collaborated without online tools
(Loughran & Stahl, 2000). Possible
causes of the lower level of satisfaction include: the increased amount of time each participant
spent on the plan and the difficulty in keeping track of everyone’s progress
and tasks in a virtual environment.
ThoughtLink is currently exploring how virtual team members develop a
shared situational awareness and which techniques and tools enhance that.
Collaboration tools and meaningful content also can
support operational virtual teams. Through
a web site, team members can create and share documents (or other digital
material) via application-sharing, and communicate both in real-time and
asynchronously.
In an operational setting, process management tools
are absolutely critical to virtual teams.
ThoughtLink’s PDD 56 experiment results and other similar research into
virtual teams make clear how easily virtual team members can lose track of
their tasks, others’ tasks, and near-term team objectives. To promote a shared understanding of the current
state of a project, as well as the past and future states, virtual teams
require a combination of the proper tools and techniques, and a good team
leader or facilitator (Loughran, 2000).
Process management tools can help by providing a common picture of who
is working on which tasks, the status of tasks, and a timeline.
ISSUES AND BENEFITS
No matter what, technology alone cannot conquer
cultural differences, and the particular domain of Crisis Planning and Response
has its own peculiarly interesting cultural problems.
Foremost among the obstacles in the development of a
CPR portal is sponsorship: this is a politically sensitive issue. Without the right sponsor, a CPR portal would
lack credibility. In turn, it would not
be used. To thrive, a successful portal
must achieve a critical mass of users who visit the site and interact with each
other frequently. Users have to choose
to use the site.
Who will pay for such a portal? Should people pay to subscribe to it? Should an international organization be
given the charter to bring these communities together in a portal? Should it be supported by advertising?
Who will provide content? The content must be open source (which in
turn may raise licensing issues) and much of it – particularly in the area of
“lessons learned” - must be delivered by practitioners.
How candid will users be? How candid can they be? Without open and frank exchanges, a community
will never blossom through the portal, nor will lessons learned or case studies
be complete and accurate.
How will security be handled? Crisis planning and response often involves
classified or sensitive/private information – however many of the players
involved do not have security clearances or access to secure networks. In practice, such information would be shared
outside the portal, either informally or using a classified system.
Despite these issues, Internet technologies alone
offer the opportunity to interweave the working and training experiences of
this amazingly diverse community on a global scale. The integration or knitting together of
different groups would be promoted through information-sharing, real-time
training, and collaboration. These
capabilities are enabled through rich content and collaboration tools. A resulting increased sense of community
could help reduce cultural barriers among civil and military groups.
A CPR portal can provide a knowledge management
capability to this community through the sharing and archiving of experience
and lessons learned.
Internet-based distance learning and training,
initiated on-demand and performed at the user’s own pace, is critical to this
community, given the time-sensitive aspect of its work. Reducing the cost of training while improving
its accessibility are also most important to reach organizations or personnel
lacking the financial resources to participate in currently available
collocated training exercises or education.
SUMMARY
A Crisis Planning and Response portal has the
potential to facilitate increased civil-military cooperation in complex
contingencies. The varied organizations
that plan for, and respond to, overseas crises have conflicting goals and
cultures that often frustrate smooth coordination for training and operations.
A CPR portal would enable information-sharing as
well as online training and education through collaboration tools. It could incorporate a collection of academic
resources, an interactive environment for active, experiential learning, a
knowledge base for the construction of virtual teams, and act as an
information-sharing conduit encouraging communication among different
communities.
By strengthening the bonds among those organizations
that are early responders to crises, the likelihood of subsequent military
involvement might be decreased or eliminated altogether, resulting in
significant savings in human suffering and costs.
Ultimately, a CPR portal’s capabilities will help us
become better prepared to respond to the complex crises that continue to arise
around the world.
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Loughran, Julia J, Stahl, Marchelle M., Eisenhour,
John Howard, Hammel, Thomas J., Marks, Edward (1999). Applying Commercial
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DARPAOOTW99Abstract.htm
Loughran, Julia (2000). Working Together Virtually: The Care and
Feeding of Global Virtual Teams. To be
published in the Proceedings of the 5th International Command and
Control Research and Technology Symposium.
http://www.thoughtlink.com/publications.htm
Loughran, Julia & Stahl, Marchelle (2000). The DICE Experiment: Creating and Evaluating
a Web-based Collaboration Environment for Interagency Training. http://www.thoughtlink.com/publications/
TLI-DICE99Abstract.htm
Schweitzer, Carole (2000). Your Portal or Theirs?. Association
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