Developing methods for timely and relevant mission impact estimation
Michael R. Grimaila, Larry W. Fortson, Janet L. Sutton, Robert F. Mills · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
Military organizations embed information systems and networking technologies into their core mission processes as a means to increase operational efficiency, improve decision making quality, and shorten the "kill chain". Unfortunately, this dependence can place the mission at risk when the loss or degradation of the confidentiality, integrity, availability, non-repudiation, or authenticity of a critical information resource or flow occurs. Since the accuracy, conciseness, and timeliness of the information used in command decision making processes impacts the quality of these decisions, and hence, the operational mission outcome; it is imperative to explicitly recognize, quantify, and document critical missioninformation dependencies in order to gain a true appreciation of operational risk. We conjecture what is needed is a structured process to provide decision makers with real-time awareness of the status of critical information resources and timely notification of estimated mission impact, from the time an information incident is declared, until the incident is fully remediated. In this paper, we discuss our initial research towards the development of a mission impact estimation engine which fuses information from subject matter experts, historical mission impacts, and explicit mission models to provide the ability to estimate the mission impacts resulting from an information incident in real-time.