Collaboration Tools for Crisis Action Planners: an Evaluation of Microsoft Office 2000

Detailed planning of complicated and multifaceted operations, often in crisis situations, is a way of life for the military. During crisis action planning, diverse staff elements must agree on a number of details for a successful plan to come together. As part of that process, staff elements must work together to assess the mission, evaluate the threat, review the forces available, and provide reasonable courses of action for the commander. Staff elements must complete several reports and briefs as a team. They collaborate together to produce mission orders, decision briefs, and several other written and graphical tools used to conduct crisis action planning under the Joint Operation Planning and Execution System JOPES. Computer software has been developed in recent years aimed at the collaborative planning market. Most have been very expensive, and their complexity is probably beyond the average military staff officer, who usually serve positions for only one to three years before moving on to other jobs. Additionally, such unique, special purpose software may not be widely accepted throughout the military, will require additional training for users, and dedicated management by systems personnel. The software maker Microsoft has announced the pending release of the latest version of their Office Suite. Known as Microsoft Office 2000, the product promises to bring several collaborative planning tools to users. This monograph examines the data sharing needs of crisis action planners, and considers the ability of the commercial software product Microsoft Office 2000 to meet those needs. Microsoft Office 2000 does offer significant collaboration tools for military planners. Most useful to the military will be the ability of average users to post and update web pages without specialized training. This will enable planning teams to use the web to share their documents with a wide audience.