Team Sensemaking Assessment Method (TSAM): an inspection method for evaluating collaborative analysis technologies

Given their size and complexity, analysis tasks (such as security or business intelligence analysis) often call for collaboration which crosses teams, agency, and even national boundaries. Successful collaboration, however, presents some significant challenges. Critical pieces of information can be scattered across a distributed analysis ‘system’ resulting in a failure to integrate and correctly interpret these in an effective and timely manner. Information technologies of various descriptions provide essential opportunities for intelligence analysis teams for activities such as data gathering and recording; performing, representing, and reflecting on analyses; and making analyses available for consumption by others. In a collaborative setting these activities are frequently distributed, shared and must be negotiated, and this places additional demands on the technologies that are required. Whilst collaborative analysis environments will inevitably evolve to meet this challenge, there is currently no clear picture of what an effective collaborative analysis team looks like, how it operates, and what tools should be deployed to support such a team. The Team Sensemaking Assessment Method (TSAM) begins to address this gap by providing a principled inspection method specifically for human factors specialists to evaluate technologies which have been proposed to support collaborative intelligence analysis and sensemaking teams.