In anticipation of shrinking budgets, the Navy has begun to examine technologies that will support a reduction in the manning requirements, and hence increase the affordability, of 21st century surface combatants. Because more work per warfighter is not viable, reduced manning implies an increased use of technologies that offset the increased workload that would otherwise be placed on future warfighters. Advanced human-computer interfaces and software-based intelligent agents have the potential to alleviate the workload associated with the use of current systems. If these advanced technologies are designed and applied correctly, future systems will allow cognitive resources to be focused on the task of accomplishing the mission rather than on the tasks of interacting with systems and synthesizing data.
However, with the introduction of these new technologies, a basic question arises as to whether the new systems actually support the decisions and task strategies necessary for mission success. It must not be assumed that a new system will support a reduced combat team simply because it uses advanced technologies. To address the question of systems effectiveness, this paper will describe a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of new systems, an experimental paradigm for collecting data, and the types of performance measurement that are needed to assess the impact of thse new technologies on human performance in a combat information center. Evaluating the impact of advanced technologies on system effectiveness and manning requirements is difficult, but critically important, and this paper will present a theoretically-based approach to this problem.