I read somewhere (probably TV Tropes, so) that what we would today recognize as a CIC (a centralized hub away from a ship's bridge for coordinating and directing a battle) was first described by Smith in his Lensman books, which went on to inspire their implementation in modern warships.
As a concept, the CIC seems like something that would arise organically from the needs of increasingly complex engagements, but Smith was writing directly before WWII and I believe he did government work in chemistry, so it's possible he was in contact with folks who would go on to implement the CIC as we know it. Can this one author really be credited with something that has become such a staple of our image of naval engagements?
The "tank"--the minutely cubed model of the galaxy which is a necessary part of every pilot room--had grown and grown as it became evident that it must be the prime agency in Grand Fleet Operations. Finally, in this last rebuilding, the tank was seven hundred feet in diameter and eighty feet thick in the middle--over seventeen million cubic feet of space in which more than two million tiny lights crawled hither and thighter in helpless confusion. For, after the technicians and designers had put that tank into actual service, they had discovered that it was useless. No available mind had been able either to percieve the situation as a whole or to identify with certainty any light or group of lights needing correction; and as for linking up any particular light with its individual, blanket-proof communicator in time to issue orders in space-combat...!
Edward Wysocki in John W. Campbell, Jr., E.E. “Doc” Smith, and the Combat Information Center examined the claim that the contemporary CIC was inspired by Smith's novel Lensman novels. In a 1947 letter, Campbell made the claim that Smith's story "Grey Lensman" (1939-1940) was the inspiration for the WWII-era CIC on naval vessels. Wysocki quotes the letter:
CIC was introduced into the Navy scheme by a navy officer who was not then, nor is not now, able to explain to the Navy precisely where he got the idea.
Unofficially, and in confidence, he has told me. The entire set-up was taken specifically, directly, and consciously from the “Directrix.” In your story, you reached the situation the Navy was in—more communication channels than integration techniques to handle it. You proposed such an integrating technique, and showed how advantageous it could be.
You, sir, were 100% right. As the Japanese Navy—not the hypothetical Boskonian fleet—learned at an appalling cost. Sitting in Michigan, some years before Pearl Harbor, you played a large share in the greatest and most decisive naval action of the recent war!
Unfortunately, in order that a Naval officer with imagination enough to apply the science-fiction ideas he studies may continue to have the maximum possible influence on the Navy, the source of his ideas—a source the Brass Hats wouldn’t take to so well—must remain undisclosed. He’s Capt. Cal Lanning [sic]. At present, he is in charge of all Naval electronic research, with special emphasis on advanced spy ray equipment, detector screens, and detector screen analysis techniques.
The end of the 1930s/early 1940s saw the advent of practical naval radar on ships. Caleb Barrett Laning was a Radio Officer in the U. S. Navy and between 1941 and 1943 he was involved in the development of the CIC. He did not actually invent the CIC, however, and the development of radar for naval vessels predates Doc Smith's Lensman stories: basically, at the time that Doc was writing about a vast "tank" for tracking thousands of spaceships in battle at once, the U. S. Navy was working on integrating radar and other sources of information into their existing destroyers and other vessels. Laning did read Astounding during this period (he was classmates with Robert Heinlein, and there are some fascinating anecdotes about them in Alec Navala-Lee's Astounding), but there's no evidence that Doc Smith's descriptions strongly influenced CIC design, and Campbell makes several other errors of fact in describing Laning's duties and role in the Navy. As Wysocki puts it:
My conclusion is that the process leading to the Campbell-Smith letter began with information accurately presented by Laning concerning his wartime and postwar connection with CIC. This information was imperfectly recalled by Campbell when he wrote about Laning many months later. Similarities were converted to influences and were, as described by Moskowitz, “imaginatively embellished.”
Which is fitting with what we know about both Laning and Campbell. Doc Smith himself never made any such claims; he did work for the U. S. Army between 1941 and '45, but in civilian life his chemical work was mostly concerned with doughnut mixes, and there is no evidence he had anything to do with the Combat Information Center development.
The issue is, both Smith and the Navy were looking at similar problems - how to coordinate large numbers of combatants and deal with the massive flows of information to control a battlefield from a single nucleus - and that has been an issue with warfare for most of human history. Smith's solution, however, doesn't look particularly like anything we would think of as the 1940s CIC; the Navy was restricted by the technology they had at the time, while Doc Smith was limited only by his imagination.