An Intelligent Lessons Learned Process

A learned lesson, in the context of a pre-defined organizational process, summarizes an experience that should be used to modify that process, under the conditions for which that lesson applies. To promote lesson reuse, many organizations employ lessons learned processes, which define how to collect, validate, store, and disseminate lessons among their personnel, typically by using a standalone retrieval tool. However, these processes are problematic: they do not address lesson reuse effectively. We demonstrate how reuse can be facilitated through a representation that highlights reuse conditions (and other features) in the context of lessons learned systems embedded in targeted decision-making processes. We describe a case-based reasoning implementation of this concept for a decision support tool and detail an example. 1 Lessons learned process Lessons learned (LL) processes (Weber et al., 2000b) are knowledge management (KM) solutions for sharing and reusing knowledge gained through experience (i.e., lessons) among an organization’s members. LL systems are motivated by the need to preserve an organization’s knowledge and convert individual knowledge into organizational knowledge so that, when experts become unavailable; other employees who encounter conditions that closely match some lesson’s context may benefit from applying it. Therefore, a lesson learned is a validated working experience that, when applied, can positively impact an organization’s processes. While some organizations can quickly update the processes targeted by lessons, thus eliminating the need for a repository of lessons, other organizations (e.g., the US military, the Department of Energy) do not have this luxury (i.e., they cannot easily update their processes), which necessitates using LL systems to explicitly store and retrieve lessons. LL systems are ubiquitous; we easily located over 40 of them on the WWW, are aware that many others are used in private industry, and discovered that they rarely succeed in promoting knowledge reuse/sharing for two reasons (Weber et al., 2000b). First, the selected representations of lessons typically are not designed to facilitate reuse, either because they do not clearly identify the process to which the lesson applies, its contribution to that process, or its pre-conditions for application. Second, these systems are usually not integrated into an organization’s decision-making