The 18 Distinct Functionalities

While doing some web surfing on user interface related subjects I came across the book on amazon.comtitled The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us. In the reviews I saw an interesting comment that referred to “the eighteen distinct functionalities needed for a desktop analysts' workstation.” I then did some more searching to find out what these were. I found the article Information Peacekeeping & The Future of Intelligence: The United Nations, Smart Mobs, & the Seven Tribes by Robert David Steele. He lists them as:

Functionalities for Finished Production
• Realtime Tracking and Realtime Group Review
• Desktop Publishing and Word Processing
• Production of Graphics, Videos, and Online Briefings
Functionalities in Support of Analytic Tradecraft
• Collaborative Work
• Notetaking and Organizing Ideas
• Structured Argument Analysis
• Interactive Search and Retrieval of Data
• Graphic and Map-Based Visualization of Data
• Modeling and Simulation
Data Entry, Conversion, and Exploitation Functionalities
• Clustering and Linking of Extracted Data
• Statistical Analysis to Reveal Anomalies
• Detection of Changing Trends
• Detection of Alert Situations
• Conversion of Paper Documents to Digital Form
• Automated Foreign Language Translation
• Processing Images, Video, Audio, Signal Data
• Automated Extraction of Data Elements from Text and Images
• Standardizing and Converting Data Forms

Wouldn’t you like to have all of these capabilities on your computer and know how to use them?