Military knowledge management: Sense-making, decision making and knowledge creation

The paper studies the evolution of military Knowledge Management from a Command and Control perspective. The study is intended to support strategic planning of knowledge creating military organisation and defining the Enterprise Architecture for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Information (C4I) System of systems (SoS). This paper is one part of writer's research in finding why so many C4I SoS implementations have faced challenges. Military Command and Control is studied within the framework of Knowledge Creation utilising tools of Evolution Theory and Path Creation to find patterns and dependencies. With this approach, the paper composes a roadmap for Military Knowledge Management. The study proceeds in finding further causalities and dependencies, which are useful in defining Military Enterprise Architectures. This approach identifies several ways to support the Cognitive level of Information Superiority defined by Perry, Signori and Boo (2004). The study proposes that development of a strategy following this approach should first begin with diagnoses of the three dimensions of Sense-making, Decision making and Learning utilising the defined roadmap before launching solution finding. The road map helps in recognising the current situation and assessing possibilities to improve them towards future. Flexibility becomes an essential requirement for all technical C4I systems since inflexibility in military structures may lead to strategic or operational surprise. The road map for Military Command and Control described in this paper is targeting to mitigate problems in defining the options and constraints for C4I architectures. It provides an additional method to analyse business layer of TOGAF 9.1 enterprise architecture model, especially from a military management viewpoint. The road map will help to align the development strategy with sense-making, decision making and organisational learning abilities.