Warfighters and Developers

“You can imagine, you’re on a mission and an Error 404 message comes up. That’s the last thing you want to see.”

-- Boeing program manager

When the U.S. Army needed a Warfighter’s Machine Interface (WMI) it turned to Boeing. When Boeing needed interface technology beyond what was currently available off the shelf, it turned to Bedford, Mass. based Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS). And when ICS needed a writer to explain how all the different moving parts in this story fit together -- organizationally and technologically -- it turned to me. (Read the customer case here.)



The challenge, as so often is the case, was to make the story both technically robust and dramatically interesting. So I told it from essentially two perspectives -- the warfighter and the developer.

The warfighter needs a clear integrated on-screen representation of the battlefield, populated both by sensors in the field (visual, auditory and more) and by information received from globally deployed databases. The developer needed a new development environment, which the developer would have to create by extending existing tools, before even starting work on the actual interface itself.

Weaving these two threads together -- the battlefield imperatives and the development challenges -- made the case work on both levels.