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The proliferation of sensor technologies continues to impact Intelligence Analysis (IA) work
domains. Historical procurement focus on sensor platform development and acquisition has resulted
in increasingly advanced collection systems; however, such systems often demonstrate classic data
overload conditions by placing increased burdens on already overtaxed human operators and
analysts. Support technologies and improved interfaces have begun to emerge to ease that burden,
but these often focus on single modalities or sensor platforms rather than underlying operator and
analyst support needs, resulting in systems that do not adequately leverage their natural human
attentional competencies, unique skills, and training. One particular reason why emerging support
tools often fail is due to the gap between military applications and their functions, and the functions
and capabilities afforded by cutting edge technology employed daily by modern knowledge workers
who are increasingly “digitally native.” With the entry of Generation Y into these workplaces, “net
generation” analysts, who are familiar with socially driven platforms that excel at giving users
insight into large data sets while keeping cognitive burdens at a minimum, are creating opportunities
for enhanced workflows. By using these ubiquitous platforms, net generation analysts have trained
skills in discovering new information socially, tracking trends among affinity groups, and
disseminating information. However, these functions are currently under-supported by existing
tools. In this paper, we describe how socially driven techniques can be contextualized to frame
complex analytical threads throughout the IA process. This paper focuses specifically on
collaborative support technology development efforts for a team of operators and analysts. Our work
focuses on under-supported functions in current working environments, and identifies opportunities
to improve a team’s ability to discover new information and disseminate insightful analytic findings.
We describe our Cognitive Systems Engineering approach to developing a novel collaborative
enterprise IA system that combines modern collaboration tools with familiar contemporary social
technologies. Our current findings detail specific cognitive and collaborative work support functions
that defined the design requirements for a prototype analyst collaborative support environment.
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