Analyzing Information in Complex Collaborative Tasks

Abstract

In this article, we present a method for analyzing the communication of people who exchange dynamic and complex information to come to a shared understanding of situations and of the actions planned and monitored by one party, but executed remotely by another. To examine this situation, we analyzed dispatchers working in police dispatch center in a large city in the Netherlands and their communication behavior in three different settings. The results of our analyses answer the question of how collaborative parties should assess an emergency situation in order to decide how to handle the incident in accordance with the procedures. Our results indicate which information must be communicated in order to deal with the current problem during the course of an incident. We will also demonstrate the proposed way of analyzing the communication used here is needed to understand how information is collaboratively handled in complex tasks.