A Toolkit for Deployable Best Practices

Discovery Machine, Inc. is partnered with Pennsylvania State University to produce a best practices capture system that goes beyond the storage and dissemination of lessons learned. The proposed system will leverage warfighters’ specific knowledge as deployable knowledge assets. These knowledge assets will be executable best practices that can be embedded in job aids and training systems. The lack of true best practices capture prevents the military from both identifying many useful standard processes but also from improving upon them over time. The problem is that bringing best practices to the warfighter requires the capture of real expertise. The tacit knowledge or key person know-how found in the heads of experienced individuals. To capture this expertise requires a methodology and technology based in cognition. It requires the military to reexamine what knowledge is and how to make it an asset. This proposal describes how to capture best practices and turn them into knowledge assets through a series of stages. Each stage leverages knowledge to provide value and each stage requires that real knowledge be captured with the intent to deploy that knowledge. The stages are described in the following sections: capture, collaborate, automate, optimize, embed and network.