The Challenge

Constantly advancing technology presents managers with a perpetual dilemma.  New and emerging technologies allow traditional functions to be carried out more effectively and efficiently.  Perhaps more important, they enable totally new capabilities that were not possible before. 

 But organizations cannot change their infrastructure continuously to keep up.  Instead, they must plan their technology investments over time and bring them on line periodically.  So the question becomes: How do we reap the benefits of investments in current infrastructure, while still allowing for periodic upgrades to more advanced technology?

 The answer is simple in statement, complex in execution, and already in operation.  It is a platform approach that allows seamless integration of existing technology as well as a baseline to integrate new and emerging technologies.  

 

Approach

 The challenges involved with adopting new technologies extend beyond scheduling.  Advanced technologies can create organizational demands as well.  One of those demands occurs when Information becomes too plentiful.  This overload can interfere with organizational process.  For example, communities and stakeholders can know the information they need, but lack the means to pull it from the flood.   

 How does the right information get to the right stakeholders at the right time?  How can these groups maintain “awareness” while they are drowning in information?  How can they effectively communicate and collaborate across organizational boundaries?  And when critical information is properly channeled, how they be sure it is understandable and prompts an appropriate response?

 The answer to these questions requires an approach that adapts to both the technical and business landscapes.   Such as our approach: 

•  Uses services-based standards for rapid systems integration.

• Employs a process-centric approach that allows stakeholders to share information and collaborate. 

• Recognizes that the value of information degrades sharply if not put into the proper context.

• Incorporates governance and business process into the overall solution.

• Underscores design principles and foundations for re-use, modularity, componentization, interoperability, and performance.

• Recognizes that difficult-to-use interfaces that are not intuitive can cause confusion at the precise moment when clarity is essential. 

Context is King

 The enormous volume of data generated by the systems and sensors of a single organization makes information management a major challenge.  Giving that information contextual meaning, i.e. including the environment that surrounds it, is the key to providing true situation awareness.  A threat in one context can be standard practice in another.

 Adding to the problem is the fluid nature of situation awareness scenarios.  The passage of time itself is constantly changing context.  It’s little wonder that bringing order to information and making it relevant to the right user at the right time – providing the context – can stretch information systems to the breaking point.

 CommandBridge creates a model of all an organization’s information assets and organizes them contextually.  Information can be ordered by contexts of community, role, mission, time, or geographic location.  Through a combination of rule-based modeling structures and Mariner’s proprietary Dynamic Data Linking (DDL) technology, evolving situation data is instantly placed in context and constantly monitored.  This process cuts through the clutter by focusing on the relevancy of the data.  It allows CommandBridge to reveal behavioral trends, identify potential threats, and perform advanced operations such as information classification, analytics, anomaly detection, alerting, and summarization, all in real-time.

 

Technology and Process Alignment

 Any technology platform must be sufficiently flexible to allow the alignment of technology with the organization’s business processes.  Automation coupled with manual overrides and human interaction controls is essential.  Overall situation awareness is significantly enhanced when the manual workload of operators is removed, allowing them to focus on end results rather than process.

 Using business rules and process activity modeling, CommandBridge can assess, define, or even govern behavior.  High-performance rules and workflow engines drive process execution and resolution, reducing the time required for data processing and eliminating redundancies.

 

Collaborative Awareness

 When situation awareness is critical, information must be constantly shared.  Communities and stakeholders need to distribute information internally and across organizational boundaries.  How is collaborative awareness accomplished?  The answer is multi-faceted and must consider the needs of the entire domain.

 Using a role-based approach, rules and workflow modeling structures enable CommandBridge to push information to stakeholders within and across organizations while ensuring its security.  Shared information is stored in role-specific queues and takes a variety of forms, such as system alerts and notifications, e-mail based alerts, workflow acknowledgement requests, chat and instant messaging, situation reports, and event snapshots.  In many cases, information can be shared directly from the user interface with a simple drag-and-drop.

 The role-based approach ensures stakeholders can communicate through a variety of means and maintain awareness throughout the organization.

 

Visualized Awareness

 Simple and intuitive user interfaces are critical to the success of any security management platform.  Users must be able to process whatever information a system generates and displays.  That means situation information needs to be displayed clearly and without ambiguity.  It must be easily recognized, understood, and ultimately, acted on.  That’s why visual user interfaces add tremendous value.

 All CommandBridge visualizations are based on sound human-factors and situation-awareness design principles.  Using a Rich Internet Application (RIA) approach, the CommandBridge User Interface (UI) employs rich media and highly visual interface metaphors.  The result focuses users on situation anomalies – providing what is important, to the right person, at the right time.