Social aspects of NEC: Information sharing and decision-making

The concept of networked enabled capability (NEC) is fast becoming integral to many aspects of modern military operations. In this paper, we argue that NEC poses new challenges for human factors integration (HFI) that can be in part addressed with reference to the extant literature on information sharing, shared knowledge and decision making. This situation arises because NEC is to some extent a social technology affecting how groups and teams interact on a mass scale. In many cases such issues were already latent within UK armed forces and other organisations, but the technological capability to network individuals and systems appears likely to bring them focal attention. In particular we address the distinction between sharing information and knowledge, the need to establish transactive networks of human knowledge alongside laying down the physical infrastructure of information networks, and in general warn against the somewhat counterintuitive effects sharing information may have. Throughout we have tried where possible to discuss how the designers of systems can produce systems sympathetic to the cognitive limitations of individuals and - in particular - groups.