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Track 8 – C 2 Assessment Tools and Metrics Track 3 – Information Sharing and Collaboration Processes and Behaviors

Geospatial Decision Support Products (GDSPs), computer-based tools that help interpret geospatial data, are ubiquitous within current military forces. Although GDSPs are used widely, and are generally perceived as useful, there is too little empirical evidence to assess the value of GDSPs to the warfighter. Achieving a better understanding of the potential value of GDSPs while they are still in development would help to prioritize scarce intellectual, physical, and monetary resources, and would result in having the most valuable GDSPs available to the warfighter. General experimental methods are well understood and have been used recently to evaluate GDSPs during development (e.g., Powell et al., 2009). However, it can take considerable time and effort to recruit the type and number of participants required to conduct experiments with adequate statistical power. This paper describes how formative evaluations emulating experiments in terms of hypotheses, scenarios, procedures, and measures, but using only a small number of subject matter experts (SMEs), can be used effectively to inform development decisions about the potential value of GDSPs. A case study in which a formative evaluation was used to inform development decisions for the Battlespace Terrain Reasoning and Awareness-Battle Command (BTRA-BC) Tactical Spatial Objects (TSOs) is presented to illustrate the method. 1. Background The fundamental goal of developing Geospatial Decision Support Products (GDSPs) for the military is to aid the military decision-maker, at whatever level, by transforming the vast amounts of geospatial data available into geospatial information products that are relevant to the decision at hand. As researchers and developers strive to provide advanced GDSPs to process more data faster and more accurately, good management necessitates the assessment of each innovation so that key resources can be allocated to areas that yield the most “bang for the buck.” The Joint Geospatial Enterprise Service (JGES) program of the U.S. Engineering, Research and Development Center (ERDC) is designed to meet this need by evaluating the value of GDSPs to military decision-making. GDSPs provide the context-specific model portion of a Geospatial Decision Support System (GDSS). GDSSs are Decision Support Systems (DSSs) that perform automated analyses of geospatial data, transforming that data into information, and displaying the resulting