See What You Think.™

Command Post of the Future (CPOF)

In partnership with PM Battle Command, General Dynamics C4 Systems is fielding a state of the art visualization and collaboration system to today’s warfighters. The Command Post of the Future (CPOF) is an executive level decision support system providing situational awareness and collaborative tools to support decision making. This tool suite is built using General Dynamics C4 Systems CoMotion® technology. CoMotion supports visualization, information analysis, and collaboration, in a single, integrated environment that ultimately helps commanders and decision makers analyze information, share thoughts, and evaluate courses of action.

• Team members share workspace and collaborate to create a rich multi-perspective shared operational picture
• Supports parallel, synchronous and asynchronous cross functional planning and execution
• Simple and easy to use Commander’s tool

Command Posts have tended to grow in order to digest and process greater amounts of information. As a result, commanders have increasingly found themselves in danger of becoming a slave to the information resident in these large structures. CPOF was developed out of a need to create a Commander centric software environment that will support distributed and collaborative operations and allow the commander to command anywhere on the battlefield.

Collaboration is more than sharing information. It involves sharing thoughts and thought processes between superiors and subordinates, subordinates, and peers. CPOF supports this type of deep collaboration –  collaboration that operates at the thought process level. In essence, CPOF creates an environment where you can tailor your visualizations to suit the way you absorb information – literally allowing others to See What You Think.

CPOF supports commanders with three key capabilities:

• 2D and 3D information visualization
• Information Liquidity: drag and drop information analysis across visualization products
• Topsight – visibility of evolving understanding among distributed subordinates and team members

These three areas are highly integrated in a single system to enable the commander and his staff to see information, interact with it (to understand it and create new information), and to selectively and dynamically share their evolving understanding of it for analysis, planning, and execution.

CPOF's greatest strength is it’s easy-to-use collaborative environment. In other automated command and control systems, collaborative tools are often an add-on or a specific application that must be engaged. In other cases, existing systems are forced to use various messaging formats or database transfer procedures. These information exchange techniques place a significant burden on the user to actually initiate the transfer and identify all addressees. CPOF’s basic environment is collaborative from the moment the system is turned on. All one has to do is drag and drop a visualization product into the “Shared Products” region, and it is instantly shared withall registered users. CPOF operators do not have to acquire an extensive repertoire of hot key and other commands to operate the system.