Abstract
System design for communication packages involves assessing communication needs and designing a set of communication vehicles to meet these needs. This article, which focuses on the first of these two steps, outlines three categories of data that are important to communication system design and proposes a system for gathering and correlating the data in these three categories. The tangible product of this gathering and correlating is a three-dimensional needs assessment matrix, which is used as part of the input for the actual design of the communication system. A later article will deal with the communication system design itself.