You are about to be tangoed. No, it is not about
drinking some adolescent fizz, this is about using the Technically
Advanced Next Generation Office, or Tango.
Last month
EADS Defence & Security Systems signed a three-year, €1m
joint development deal with Edinburgh University to develop an
"instrumented environment" that can monitor and record how
decisions are reached in meetings.
The initial target markets range from board rooms, through No
10's Cabinet Room, to the command and control rooms of military and
civil defence organisations, says Simon Bradley, vice-president and
head of engineering, IT, environment of systems and simulation at
EADS Innovation Works, the firm's research and development arm.
EADS executives, starting with the Tango project team, will be
the first to use the multimedia information centre to access data
and track how they reach decisions. Their aim is to improve
decision-making in the organisation and to improve governance and
accountability to shareholders.
Tony Bagnoll, head of operations at the division, said Tango
would be valuable to organisations because it embedded policies and
governance information. This would allow it to track whether the
people making decisions had the authority to make them. "If things
go wrong, it will also be useful to go back and see what
information they had at the time they took the decision," he
said.
The Tango room records everything that is said and presented in
the meeting in sound, image and video. Bradley said they could
annotate the emotions expressed in the meeting and feed them into
avatars (representative simulations of the meeting's participants)
for play-back.
"This is not about pinning the blame on anyone but understanding
what happened to improve the process of how we arrive at
decisions," Bagnoll said. However, he admits lawyers might strain
to get access to the system when things go wrong.
An old idea
The idea behind Tango is not new. In the 1980s International
Computers Ltd or ICL (now part of Fujitsu Computers) developed The
Pod. This was a similar enclosed high-tech meeting space with an
early version of interactive video whiteboards. But that failed
because the networks of the time were too slow and expensive, and
the mix of digital and analogue technology too creaky to make it
viable, says Bagnoll. Now the required technologies, in particular
data security, are up to scratch, he says.
However, Edinburgh University did not give up on the idea. It
worked on what it called the "instrumented office", mainly to find
a better way of taking minutes and storing the data on which the
decisions were taken.
But it was not until Bagnoll recognised its applicability to
security and defence situation rooms that it caught fire.
Innovation Works is now planning to develop different "flavours"
of Tango. On the cards are one for the army in its role as a
peace-keeper, another for war-fighting, yet another for
humanitarian actions. These are in addition to civilian and
commercial applications such as financial trading rooms and board
rooms.
But don't people get camera-shy as they do in video-conferences?
Bagnoll says Edinburgh has conducted some 800 live meetings at
which genuine decisions were reached. "In 90% of cases people soon
reverted to type and forgot that they were being recorded," he
says.
Bradley and Bagnoll are now putting in infrastructure such as
communications lines to the university and 360-degree cameras to
set up the room.
They hope to have working versions within 18 months, and a
"shrink-wrapped, fully industrialised" commercial offering within
three years.