Lessons-Learned (LL) System

A Lessons-Learned (LL) System is a Knowledge Management System that collects, stores, as well as disseminates experiential working knowledge and that is usually deployed in commercial, government, and military organizations.

• AKA: Intelligent Lessons-Learned System.
• Example(s):
  • NASA Lessons Learned System,
  • Army Lessons Learned (CALL) System,
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • an Ontology Management System.
• See: Case-based Reasoning System, Artificial Intelligence, NATO's Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre (JALLC).

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References

2020a

• (NASA, 2020) ⇒ https://www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/functions/lessons/index.html
  • QUOTE: The NASA Lessons Learned system is a database of lessons learned from contributors across NASA and other organizations. It contains the official, reviewed learned lessons from NASA programs and projects. Its varied contents are sought by thousands of visitors a month who represent a multitude of disciplines including science, engineering, education, manufacturing, and project management.

2020b

• (Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_learned Retrieved:2020-9-20.
  • Lessons learned or lessons learnt are experiences distilled from a project that should be actively taken into account in future projects.

    There are several definitions of the concept. The one used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency sounds as follows: “A lesson learned is knowledge or understanding gained by experience. The experience may be positive, as in a successful test or mission, or negative, as in a mishap or failure...A lesson must be significant in that it has a real or assumed impact on operations; valid in that is factually and technically correct; and applicable in that it identifies a specific design, process, or decision that reduces or eliminates the potential for failures and mishaps, or reinforces a positive result.” The Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defines lessons learned as “Generalizations based on evaluation experiences with projects, programs, or policies that abstract from the specific circumstances to broader situations. Frequently, lessons highlight strengths or weaknesses in preparation, design, and implementation that affect performance, outcome, and impact.” In the practice of the United Nations the concept has been made explicit in the name of their Working Group on Lessons Learned of the Peacebuilding Commission. In the military field, conducting a Lessons learned analysis requires a leader-led after-actions debriefing. These debriefings require the leader to extend the lessons-learned orientation of the standard after-action review. He uses the event reconstruction approach or has the individuals present their own roles and perceptions of the event, whichever best fits the situation and time available.

2001

• (Weber et al., 2001) ⇒ Rosina Weber, David W. Aha, and Irma Becerra-Fernandez (2001). "Intelligent Lessons Learned Systems". In: Expert systems with applications, 20(1). DOI:10.1016/S0957-4174(00)00046-4.
  • QUOTE: Lessons learned processes have been deployed in commercial, government, and military organizations since the late 1980s to capture, store, disseminate, and share experiential working knowledge. However, recent studies have shown that software systems for supporting lesson dissemination do not effectively promote knowledge sharing. We found that the problems with these systems are related to their textual representation for lessons and that they are not incorporated into the processes they are intended to support. In this article, we survey lessons learned processes and systems, detail their capabilities and limitations, examine lessons learned system design issues, and identify how artificial intelligence technologies can contribute to knowledge management solutions for these systems.

2000

• (Weber et al., 2000) ⇒ Rosina Weber, David W. Aha, and Irma Becerra-Fernandez (2000). "Categorizing Intelligent Lessons Learned Systems". In: Intelligent Lessons Learned Systems: Papers from the AAAI 2000 Workshop.
  • QUOTE: Lessons learned (LL) systems have been deployed many military, commercial, and government organizations to disseminate validated experiential lessons. They support organizational lessons learned processes, which use a knowledge management (KM) approach to collect, store, disseminate, and reuse experiential working knowledge that, when applied, can significantly benefit targeted organizational processes (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). Unfortunately, based on our interviews and discussions with members of several LL centers (e.g., at the Joint Warfighting Center, the Department of Energy (DOE), the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA), the Construction Industry Institute), we learned that LL systems, although well-intentioned, are rarely used.
    (...)
    According to our model, LL processes implement a strategy for reusing experiential knowledge necessary to support an organization’s goals. LL systems can be categorized in accordance with the subset of the five subprocesses that they support, namely collect, verify, store, disseminate, and reuse.

Figure 1: A generic lessons learned process.

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