Abstract: Computerized support systems enhancing taskforce performance are being increasingly used in different organizations in the emergency response, crisis management and military fields. Organizational demands for improved mission capabilities and reduced budgets impose new requirements on data content and system performance. More information needs to be provided by humans in the field, reporting observations from the evolving course of events in order to enhance possibilities for operational analyses and continuous development of organizational abilities. In this paper, we describe a method that can improve human data-collection abilities and data quality when using human observers as data collecting sensors in distributed tactical operations by applying model-based data collection. We introduce a tool that can support observers in the field, the network-based observer tool that can support human observers in determining what to report and how to report observations. We present results and findings from three different use cases. © 2012 ISCRAM.