Collaborative Virtual Environments for Analysis and Decision Support

The virtual office has been a dream for decades. Computer supported collaborative environments move us toward this vision by providing services such as integrated desktop conferencing, shared applications, and workflow management. They have been successfully applied to distance learning and collaborative design. In this article we report on the successful creation and application of a place-based virtual collaboration environment [1] for distributed analysis and collaborative planning in mission critical environments for intelligence and defense. We describe a set of collaboration object services inspired from this experience. We outline empirical evaluations of the system's impact in two domains, the two largest virtual environments in the US government. We conclude by describing lessons learned from these experiences that might facilitate successful future deployments.