Bridging the Lesson Distribution Gap

Many organizations employ lessons learned (LL) processes to collect, analyze, store, and distribute, validated experiential knowledge (lessons) of their members that, when reused, can substantially improve some evaluation measures of targeted organizational decision processes. Unfortunately, deployed LL systems do not facilitate lesson reuse, and thus fail to bridge the lesson distribution gap between the lesson repository and targeted decision processes (i.e., they fail to bring lessons to the attention of users when and where they are needed and applicable). Our approach for solving this problem, named monitored distribution, tightly integrates lesson distribution with these decision processes. We describe a case-based implementation of monitored distribution (ALDS) in a plan authoring tool suite (HICAP) and evaluate its utility in a simulated military planning domain. Our results show that monitoried distribution can significantly improve plan evaluation measures for this domain.