Case Study of a Complex Informing System: Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX)
Author
Murphy, William F.
Murphy, Sandra Sanchez
Buettner, Raymond R. Jr.
Gill, T. Grandon
Date
2015Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) event, organized by the Naval Postgraduate
School (NPS), is conducted 3-4 times a year at various locations. The four day event can be characterized
as an informing system specifically designed to facilitate structured and unstructured
communications between a variety of parties—e.g., software developers, inventors, military and
civilian users of various technologies, academics, and agencies responsible for identifying and
procuring technology solutions—that frequently are constrained in their informing activities in
more restrictive venues. Over the course of the event, participants may observe technology
demonstrations, obtain feedback from potential users, acquire new ideas about their technologies
might be employed and, perhaps most significantly, engage in ad hoc collaborations with other
participants.
The present paper describes an exploratory case research study that was conducted over a one
year period and involved both direct observation of the event and follow-up interviews with 49
past participants in the event. The goal of the research was to assess the nature of participant-impact
resulting from attending JIFX and to consider the consistency of the findings with the predictions
of various theoretical frameworks used in informing science. The results suggest that
participants perceived that the event provided significant value from three principal sources: discovery,
interaction with potential clients (users) of the technologies involved, and networking
with other participants. These findings were largely consistent with what could be expected from
informing under conditions of high complexity; because value generally derives from combinations
of attributes rather than from the
sum of individual attributes, we would
expect that overall value from informing
activities will be perceived even though
estimates of the incremental value of
that informing cannot be made.
Description
The article of record as published may be found at http://www.inform.nu/Articles/Vol18/ISJv18p063-109Murphy1655.pdf
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Collections
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