Overwatch Dashboard for Situation Awareness
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Dashboard Spy readers will have to forgive the obvious cliche when it comes to selecting spy agency dashboards to highlight on this forum. Several posts ago, we featured a very interesting situation awareness and security threat management system created by some former Isreali Air Force members that drew some interest in this dashboarding community. So, we thought we’d check in on some Dashboard Spies (literally) at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to see what they’ve been doing in terms of dashboards.
The DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) is a DOD (Department of Defense - and you thought you had a lot of acroynms in the world of IT!) combat support agency with over 11,000 military and civilian employees located around the world. It produces and manages much of our country’s foreign military intelligence. The information feeds many of the U.S. military planning, operations and weapons systems acquisition efforts.
The DIA runs a dashboard application called Overwatch. They call it a VOC (Virtual Operating Center). It integrates multiple intelligence sources into a desktop intelligence asset dashboard. Basically it provides us with situation awareness of military information.
Here’s a peek at the Overwatch Dashboard:

The design philosophy behind the dashboard is to let the end user, rather than the IT department, configure as many views as possible. Situation awareness need are very fluid and this application attempts to empower the user through drag and drop selection of information views and sharing. In order to do so, it had to be a desktop application.
The military analysts at the DIA required a lot of bookmarking ability in this dashboard. When they found information and data relationships, they more often wanted to save it for later analysis rather than study it right then and there (browsing mode versus analysis mode).
Tags: Military Dashboards, Situation Awareness Dashboard

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