Main Project Capabilities & Focus Areas
Challenge
While information is an instrument of national power, there are currently no meaningful measures to assess how information operations such as activities (i.e., information maneuvers) on social networks influence mission success. However, operations in the information environment are complex involving information maneuvers and deliberate planning that are performed to achieve an advantage by exploiting, neutralizing, or defeating an information campaign. The information environment is a highly competitive space that combines social-cultural factors, information technologies, a multitude of actors, and an absence of accepted international norms.
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Solution
The purpose of OMEN Measurement and Assessment of Information Maneuver Analyst (IMA) research is to establish a valid baseline of performance measures that produces diagnostic feedback for guiding individual and team performance. We transformed a conceptual model of information operations into a mastery model, which is used to measure analyst performance.
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Result
The IMA mastery model represents key performance areas within three information warfare domains, i.e., the physical, information, and cognitive. Within the IMA model we used data to associate analyst tasks and reasoning skills with behavioral indicators by grounding ourselves in the doctrinal literature, collecting data from experienced analysts, and defining tasks along a 5-point scale. The mastery model describes how the IMAs recognize patterns, interpret their significance, decide on a maneuver, and assess how social network behaviors influence mission objectives.
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This effort is sponsored by the U.S. Navy and the Office of Naval Research.
