Some Thoughts Regarding Data-Centric Consultation, Command and Control

Building on the advances that have been made in data analytics and machine learning, there is a push to achieve data centricity; that is, to move away from the application centric (stove piped) mind-set that has dominated our thinking and solutions for decades, to a situation where we put data at the centre of our Consultation, Command and Control (C3). This offers the possibility for users to embrace data driven decision making, with the aim of facilitating more accurate and more timely decisions. On top of this, at least in the commercial world, we are seeing a shift to a more distributed approach where data exploitation is carried out ‘in the business' rather than by dedicated specialist central teams, thus empowering those closest to the problem to mine data to build situational awareness, courses of actions and reach decisions relevant to their part of the business. This current paper examines how some of the advances in the commercial world, particularly in the area of composable, self-service application delivery, can be applied to the situation of military command and control applications, providing a first answer to the questions of how might Data-Centric C3 (DCC3) differ from today's norms across the people, organisation, technology, data and funding dimensions. It argues that the data layer is the ‘special sauce’ that provides seamless integration and enabled Multi-Domain Operations. The paper acknowledges that this will represent a radical shift in how we do things, what skills we will require, etc. While it may be possible to evolve our current systems to the new paradigm, procurement process, funding mechanisms and such will require revolutionary approaches. This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel, IST-200RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Skopje, North Macedonia, 16–17 May 2023.