Enabling Agile Information Management Workflows for C2

Military forces are being called upon to execute a broad spectrum of missions, with a desire to assemble, deploy, and make operational capability within mere days. A critical challenge in enabling such agile capabilities is to ensure that all participants understand their roles, responsibilities, and relationships throughout an evolving mission. From an information management perspective, supporting command and control (C2) systems themselves must be agile and capable of accommodating change. Traditionally, C2 systems attempt to be anticipatory of information needs and provide fixed data model designs intended to support all envisioned use cases. Such designs tend to be brittle and inflexible as mission needs change. We propose an information modeling approach that values run-time flexibility over design-time anticipation, focusing on the essential information that C2 systems must model and share. This paper establishes a functional concept and guiding principles to enable information workflows that support agile C2. We describe and demonstrate a set of principles that can be used to build and share a structured yet flexible representation of essential C2 information that can support the evolution of agile C2 capabilities.