Supporting the Cognitive Work of Information Analysis and Synthesis: A Study of the Military Intelligence Domain

Abstract

Information Analysis and Synthesis (henceforth “IAS”) is a type of cognitive work that plays a key role in many high-performance, complex, and mission-critical domains. These can range from tactical military intelligence to scientific or technological forecasting, business and financial intelligence to national strategic counterterrorism, and include areas as disparate as geopolitical policy analysis to computer network intrusion detection. The specific subject of this study is the military intelligence domain as one instantiation of IAS. Several innovative ethnographic and cognitive task analysis methods were used to observe team-based distributed work done by actual domain practitioners. The main investigative effort took the form of a scaled-world study, leveraging a real world tactical intelligence training exercise as a natural laboratory for investigating the contrasts between weaker and stronger IAS. Specifically, we examined the role of instructors in providing broadening checks to the team analytic process, and mapped the findings to an existing framework.