Situation Awareness Analysis and Measurement: Analysis and Measurement

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book with wider appeal than just intended audience
Review: This book is a collection of papers that address exactly what the title implies - how to analyze and measure situation awareness qualities of systems. The most obvious uses for this specialized human factors discipline is in safety-critical combat systems, with a good deal of the body of knowledge coming from military and commercial aviation. My perspective is different - I purchased this book to glean knowledge and techniques for application in the design of large scale IT systems management. I was not disappointed.

This three part, 16 chapter book starts with a brief introduction to situation awareness theory and concepts, and gives a synopsis of the current body of knowledge and state of the art.

Part II covers measurement approaches with nine chapters (each are individual papers written by experts in their respective fields), that cover topics ranging from the use of SA in critical incident reports to testing and metrics. I found two thirds of these papers helpful to my narrow purposes, which are outside of the SA field. That alone speaks highly of the book and the wide applicability of the material it addresses. Part III addressed special topics, and of the five papers I found four directly applicable to my learning objectives.

As I was reading this book it because apparent that SA is a topic that touches disciplines outside of the domain in which it's traditionally used. For example, a software game designer (which I am not) could learn much about developing user interfaces that maximize the user experience. On the business side, developers who design decision support systems would find many of the ideas and concepts extremely useful, as would any analyst or developer who is designing advanced user interfaces (hardware or software) for interactive systems. In my opinion this book is a hidden gem that changed my thinking and approach about situation awareness on a number of levels. I also recommend "The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems" by David Luckham as a companion to this book for readers who are in software and hardware engineering disciplines

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book with wider appeal than just intended audience
Review: This book is a collection of papers that address exactly what the title implies - how to analyze and measure situation awareness qualities of systems. The most obvious uses for this specialized human factors discipline is in safety-critical combat systems, with a good deal of the body of knowledge coming from military and commercial aviation. My perspective is different - I purchased this book to glean knowledge and techniques for application in the design of large scale IT systems management. I was not disappointed.

This three part, 16 chapter book starts with a brief introduction to situation awareness theory and concepts, and gives a synopsis of the current body of knowledge and state of the art.

Part II covers measurement approaches with nine chapters (each are individual papers written by experts in their respective fields), that cover topics ranging from the use of SA in critical incident reports to testing and metrics. I found two thirds of these papers helpful to my narrow purposes, which are outside of the SA field. That alone speaks highly of the book and the wide applicability of the material it addresses. Part III addressed special topics, and of the five papers I found four directly applicable to my learning objectives.

As I was reading this book it because apparent that SA is a topic that touches disciplines outside of the domain in which it's traditionally used. For example, a software game designer (which I am not) could learn much about developing user interfaces that maximize the user experience. On the business side, developers who design decision support systems would find many of the ideas and concepts extremely useful, as would any analyst or developer who is designing advanced user interfaces (hardware or software) for interactive systems. In my opinion this book is a hidden gem that changed my thinking and approach about situation awareness on a number of levels. I also recommend "The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems" by David Luckham as a companion to this book for readers who are in software and hardware engineering disciplines