The main project results are:
• A comprehensive analysis of the institutional and operational aspects of situational awareness, information exchange and operational control in the context of EU CSDP civilian missions highlighting the political and institutional background, both in Brussels and in the field, to be considered in the development and deployment of the future OCP.
• A set of functional and non-functional requirements and recommendations to build up the OCP derived from the analysis of the CSDP missions domain and following the general project approach, characterised by a constant effort to integrate the institutional, working processes and technical perspectives. The elaboration of these requirements has been based on the descriptions from users on the current way of working in the CSDP context.
• Three technical options for an OCP workplace, which fit into a growth model. These options have been described as “Information sharing and collaborative information management”, “Information integration” and “Decision and analysis support”. The design of these technical options was influenced by the operational requirements compiled along the project, the current ICT landscape in civilian missions, the state of the art research and the findings from the UN visit. This visit provided a comprehensive set of lessons learned in terms of institutional and organizational aspects in the context of peace and humanitarian operations and also of IT solutions.
• A concept for an OCP development roadmap structured around three major waypoints: 1) ‘focus on efficiency’, where most current inefficiencies in information sharing have been removed , 2) ‘step change’ where the mission organisation takes a major step towards with new procedures, new roles and new collaboration functions; and 3) ‘transformation’ in which the structures and decisions at the technological, organisational and institutional level are all designed to allow missions to work in a self-organising, network-centric manner.
• A community of stakeholders forged through many dissemination consultation and validation activities. These activities included more than 100 hundred interviews in Brussels (to European Commission, EDA , GSC and EEAS staff) and to people working in the field (EULEX Kosovo, EUCAP Sahel Mali, EUCAP Sahel Niger, EUNAVFOR MED – operation Sophia , EUCAP Nestor and EUNAVFOR Somalia – operation Atalanta), two workshops and several meetings witht a reduced group of End-users. All these activities have allowed us to raise awareness about the project objectives and outcomes among the personnel involved in the planning and implementation of CSDP civilian missions
The main Project conclusions and recomendations are gathered in a policy brief document. Current problems related to information exchange don’t solely stem from technical limitations but most important from institutional and organizational aspects that can’t be overcome merely by improved technology. The OCP innitiative should be grounded on a clearly defined strategy, specific operational objectives and defined performance ambitions.
