Implications of net-centricity for C2:
hierarchy, autonomy, common resources
Russ Abbott, The Aerospace Corporation
Roberta Ewart, USAF/SMC
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© 2006 The Aerospace Corporation
Contents
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Command and control is
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How command intent is communicated and ensured?
•
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Centralized command — decentralized execution?
•
How responsibility and authority are assigned?
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How organizations communicate and operate?
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Platforms enable … more platforms.
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Innovative organizations.
What is command and control?
“The exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated
commander [emphasis added] over assigned and attached forces in
the accomplishment of the mission.
“Command and control functions are performed through an
arrangement of personnel, equipment, communications, facilities,
and procedures employed by a commander in planning, directing,
coordinating, and controlling forces and operations in the
accomplishment of the mission.”
Department of Defense, Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms
Enables
hierarchical
structure
and control
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Commandercentric
Assures
accountability
What’s wrong with this picture?
Command
and Control
Downward pointing arrows: commands.
Upward pointing arrows: status reports.
Can be implemented with
point-to-point communication links.
No horizontal communication.
No dashed lines. (Is that good?)
It’s not accurate as a
communication or
operational structure.
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It may represent how authority is delegated,
and it may represent how responsibility is assigned,
but it doesn’t represent how communication occurs
or how organizations really work.
What is Command and Control?
The future of command and control is not Command and Control.
In fact, the term Command and Control has
become a significant impediment to progress.
Efforts have been made to (re)define this term
in ways that would make it more relevant to
21st century organizations and endeavors.
Efforts to date, however, have not been able to overcome the
deeply ingrained belief that the term Command and Control is
synonymous with a specific approach, namely the way
traditional military organizations are organized and operate.
The term thus has become
unalterably frozen in time.
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Dave Alberts, Director CCRP.
“Agility, Focus, and Convergence: The Future of Command and
Control,” The International C2 Journal, DoD/CCRP. April 2007.
What is Command and Control?
For our purposes we will define command and control as
The structures and
The focus is on interaction among
processes through which
participants in the organization.
an organization operates.
Everything is both an
entity and a group.
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David Sloan Wilson,
Evolution for Everyone
From point-to-point links to platforms
The communication system
(even if just a telephone system)
is the start of net-centricity
Need more than fixed point-topoint communication channels
Becomes reified as an
additional component—not
just a collection of interfaces.
But a network/platform
does nothing on its own.
“Platform”
Must distinguish between
communication structure
and command hierarchy.
Enabling communication neither
eliminates responsibility nor
undermines command intent.
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As a common
resource, how does it
fit into the hierarchy?
The fundamental question
How will the organization
use the network/platform?
It’s all platforms
Movie marketing
Voicemail
Telemarketing
Telephone system
Talk show
Politics
Talk show
Television channel
Talk show
Politics
TV show
Television channel
Television infrastructure
…
Service
Service
Service
ServiceMashups
Service
Google
Service maps
Service
Craig’s
Service
list
Interest groups
Service
ServiceWikipedia
Service
Email
Product
Service
storeService
store
Service
eBay
SOA framework
WWW
Internet
Service
Other infrastructure elements
Free market economic system
Courts: dispute resolution
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Money and banking system
Civil society
Layered architectures — not functional decomposition
Each layer is a platform that
a) is built on the layers below it
b) enables higher level layers
to be built on top of it
c) is vulnerable to disruption.
Asymmetric
warfare
Applications, e.g., email, IM, Wikipedia
WWW (HTML) — browsers + servers
Presentation
Session
Transport
Network
Physical
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Governance: platforms are not like most businesses
Multi-sided platform
A means, mechanism, or set of
conventions that structure and
enable interaction among parties.
Platform service provider
Platform
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•
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Examples
Internet – WWW – GIG.
A credit card service.
A shopping center.
A dating service.
Whoever owns/runs/controls
it, has users at their mercy.
• Not a typical business product or service.
• Does not combine components from suppliers
Owner’s and users’ priorities
to make and sell a product for consumers.
may not be compatible.
• Enables interaction.
• Value depends on breadth of use.
Governance of common resources
• Often called a network effect.
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becomes a central issue.
Wise crowds: more than the sum of their parts
Traditional wise crowds
• Teams
• Juries
• Democratic voting
Web wise crowd platforms
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•
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Wikis
Mailing lists
Chat rooms
Prediction markets
Condorcet Jury Theorem (18th century) example
• Five people (a small crowd).
• Each person has a 75% chance of being right.
• Probability that the majority will be right: ~90%
(James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds)
(Scott Page, The Difference)
Wise crowd criteria
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Emergence.
Diverse: different skills and information brought to the table.
Decentralized and with independent participants:
Participant
autonomy.
• No one at the top dictates the crowd's answer.
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•
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Each person free to speak his/her own mind and make own decision.
Distillation mechanism: to extract the essence of the crowd's wisdom.
A wise crowd as assistant and companion
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Innovative environments
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The Internet
The inspiration for net-centricity and the GIG
Goal: to bring the creativity of the internet to the DoD
Other innovative environments
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The scientific and technological research process
The market economy
Biological evolution
What do
innovative environments
have in common?
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Innovative environments
Innovation is always the result of an evolutionary process.
• Randomly generate new possibilities.
• Select the good ones.
(Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea)
How does this apply to organizations?
To ensure innovation:
Creation and trial
• Encourage the prolific generation and trial of new ideas.
Reaping the rewards of success
• Allow new ideas to flourish or wither based on how well they do.
Sounds simple doesn’t it?
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Innovation in various environments
New ideas
aren’t the
problem.
Biological
evolution
Entrepreneur
Bureaucracy
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Trying them out
Initial funding
Prospect of
failure
Capitalism in
the small.
Nature always
experiments.
Most are failures,
which means
death. (But no
choice given.)
Little needed
for an Internet
experiment.
Perhaps some
embarrassment,
time, money; not
much more.
Proposals,
competition,
forms, etc.
Who wants a
failure in his/her
personnel file?
Reaping
rewards
Approvals
Reaping
rewards
None.
Bottom-up
resource
allocation
defines
success.
Few.
Entrepreneur
wants rewards.
Bottom-up
resource
allocation.
Far too
many.
Managers have
other priorities.
Top-down
resource
allocation.
The challenge
Was there a
message in
that bottle?
Hierarchy (command intent and
responsibility) is not inconsistent
with net-centricity (platforms).
Governance of common resources
(platforms) will be a challenge.
Hierarchy (top-down control) can
be a significant impediment to
wise crowds and innovation.
To identify and adopt C2 frameworks that
encourage hierarchical organizations to
build platforms that enable wise crowds
and facilitate innovation.
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