To be successful in today’s technological and business and military climates, it is imperative that business and military processes be efficient, timely, and accurate. However, in the modern enterprise, business and military operations are in a constant state of flux evolving from one form to another in fluid and often unpredictable ways. The major problem for the modern enterprise is how to become more aware, more flexible, and more agile. Making the warfighter aware of current trends and the current situation to include providing timely and accurate military knowledge allows the warfighter to anticipate and respond to what is happening in an unpredictable and changing environment. Flexibility enables an enterprise to plan for the anticipated changes, while agility allows an enterprise to respond to unanticipated, unpredictable changes, which is key to operating in the modern enterprise.

To achieve the ultimate combination of awareness, flexibility, and agility is to support dynamic and flexible processes that adapt as situations change. Such systems will need to support growing volumes of information and produce accurate and relevant metrics about past, current, and future situations. And, they will need to provide complete control and visibility into the entire enterprise. These features ultimately require a flexible, distributed architecture that enables secure collaboration, advanced information management, dynamic system updates, and custom, rule-based processes. This allows the warfighter to work in a more timely and effective manner, reduce overhead costs on wasted resources or time-consuming processes, and get the information they need when they need it. Information that is shareable inside a unit, with other units and joint forces provides information that is more meaningful and produces overall, shared awareness. Shared awareness, in turn, enables faster operations; and, faster, effective work means greater productivity, greater competitiveness, and greater profit margins for your enterprise.

Intelligent agent technology provides the means to achieve these requirements most effectively. More flexible and sophisticated than peer-to-peer or object-oriented computing, intelligent agent-based systems deal with massive amounts of information to levels of accuracy, timeliness and quality never before possible. Applications that use only object-oriented technology usually fail to achieve the goals of awareness, flexibility, and agility because processes are hard-coded in the applications. And, customizing processes tends to be the most costly component of enterprise systems because of this shortfall. When enterprise applications are process-oriented and can enable accurate and current situation awareness, dynamic planning, and rich collaboration capabilities as intelligent agent systems can, these goals can be achieved quickly and cost effectively.

Managing the problems of dynamic change, agile execution, and flexible business processes are the main challenges that Cougaar Software solutions address. With our ActiveEdge platform, which provides an infrastructure for building distributed, intelligent agent-based applications, and our unique situational reasoning framework (SRF), you can achieve a knowledge-enabled enterprise that provides accurate and comprehensive situation awareness for your local and global enterprise operations.