Experience Maintenance
Why Experience Maintenance?
Consider the cases
- when a highly skilled employee leaves, he “takes his
experience” with him
- when new employees are inducted, they have to be trained
manually
- when the current project at hand is very similar to one that
has been done before – do we need to do it all over again?
Solution : Experience Maintenance!
What is Experience Maintenance
Formally, it is defined as
…‘the acquisition, sharing and use of
knowledge within organizations,
including learning processes and
management information systems’
What is Experience Maintenance
In other words
It is an information system that aids knowledge
workers to create, integrate and reuse knowledge in
an organization.
What is the role of knowledge in IS,
and IS development?
Requirements
Analysis
Systems
Design
System
Implementation
Customer
Forms
Order
Spec
ERD
Product
Customer
Order
Scheduled
Delivery
Product
Scheduled
Delivery
Salesperson
Salesperson
Architecture
Update
Marketing
Authorize
Credit
Tables
Order
Entry
Bill
Customer
VB Code
Schedule
Delivery
Inventory
Knowledge
about world
Refer
Experience
Base
Reuse
applicable
experience
Update
Experience
Base
VC++ Code
Types of Experience
Explicit




You can
communicate
Easy to formalize
Savable on
different media
disembodied
Implicit

hard to
communicate
Hard to formalize
Saved in brain

embodied


Experience Maintenance System converts implicit
knowledge into explicit
Data to Knowledge
Very Valuable!
Experience Maintenance Cycle
Collect
Identify
Classify
Create
Organize/
Store
Use/Exploit
Access
Share/
Disseminate
Why Experience Maintenance?

Product lifecycle becomes shorter

Streamline operations and reduce costs by eliminating
redundant or unnecessary processes

Reduce training time

Foster innovation by encouraging the free flow of ideas

Improve customer service by streamlining response time

Boost revenues by getting products and services to
market faster

Enhance employee retention rates by recognizing the
value of employees' knowledge and rewarding them for it
Main Areas of Experience
Maintenance

Capturing knowledge

Storing knowledge

Creating knowledge

Distributing knowledge

Sharing knowledge

Using knowledge
Transfer knowledge from the individual to the
collective realm
What does an Experience
Management System Share
 Skills
 Experiences
 Reflections
 Lessons
 Memoirs
 Technical advice
 Experts intuition
 Case studies
 Best practices
 Methodologies
INRECA
INRECA supports the development of experience
management applications by an experience
management approach itself.



Targeted at industrial experience management
applications development
Based on software engineering techniques and
using these techniques to build/maintain
experience management applications
Applies Case-Based Reasoning to experience
management application development
INRECA
INRECA
Company 1
Company 2
Company 3
Company 4 … Company N
…
EMA 1
EMA 2
EMA 3
EMA 4
EMA N
INRECA
Product 1
Product 2
Company 1
EMA 1
Product 3
.
.
.
Product N
INRECA Methodology
The INRECA Methodology (contd.)
- Has an experience base containing specific experience on
how to build experience management applications
- This experience base is represented in the form of linked
HTML documents.
-


The structure of these documents and the linking structure
is derived from software process modeling
Using this form (textual based) of representation results
in:
Increased flexibility
Decreased accuracy
INRECA Process Model
The INRECA Process Model has 3 main components:
1.
Process – Describes what should be done
2.
Method – Describes how to do it
3.
Product – Describes what is output of the process
Input
Product
Complex
Method
Output
Product
Process
Simple
Method
INRECA Experience Base
INRECA Experience Base is organized on 3 levels of
abstraction:
1. Common Generic Level
The processes, products and methods in this level are
common across a wide spectrum of different experience
management applications.
2. Cookbook Level
The processes, products and methods in this level are
tailored for a particular class of applications
(e.g. help desk, technical maintenance, product catalog).
3. Specific Project Level
This level describes experience in the context of a single,
particular project that has been carried out.
INRECA Experience Base
Common
Generic
Level
Cookbook
level
Specific
Project
Level
Building blocks & general purpose approach
Recipe 1
Recipe 2
…
Recipe N
…
App. 1
App. 2
App. 3
App. N
INRECA Processes
The INRECA methodology adapts techniques used in software
engineering.
As a result of this, the INRECA process modeling is very much
similar to software process modeling.
Like in software process modeling, the processes in INRECA
are divided into 3 types:



Technical processes
Organizational processes
Managerial processes
INRECA Processes

Technical processes
These describe the development of the system and
the required documentation.
e.g. requirement analysis, testing, system design.

Organizational processes
These address those parts of the organization’s
business process in which the newly developed system will
be embedded.
e.g. in building a help-desk system, organizational
processes could be training help-desk personnel, updating
help-desk system
INRECA Processes

Managerial processes
The primary goal of these is to provide services for
enacting the technical and the organizational processes.
e.g. project planning, quality assurance and monitoring
INRECA Descriptions
The INRECA methodology contains descriptions of each of the
processes, methods and products.
There are 2 kinds of descriptions
Generic Descriptions
These describe the products, methods and
processes in a way that is independent of a specific
development project
e.g. for a GUI development project, generic description would
specify the general information the GUI should contain
Specific Descriptions
These elaborate processes, methods and products
for a particular development project.
e.g. for a GUI development project, specific description would
be the GUI tool used, client GUI specification etc.
INRECA Descriptions
These descriptions are stored as HTML documents and the
documents are linked hierarchically.
There are totally 8 kinds of documents in the INRECA experience
base
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Generic
Generic
Generic
Generic
Process Description Sheet
Product Description Sheet
Simple Method Description Sheet
Complex Method Description Sheet
Specific
Specific
Specific
Specific
Process Description Sheet
Product Description Sheet
Simple Method Description Sheet
Complex Method Description Sheet
INRECA Process Description Sheet
INRECA Reuse
The INRECA Reuse Procedure
1. Characterize New
Project
2. Recipe
Available?
3a.Analyze Process
From Recipe
3b. Select Similar
Specific Project
3c.Develop Project
Plan by Reuse
4a. Analyze Process
From Common
Generic Level
4b. Develop Project
Plan by Combining
Processes
5. Enact Project &
Record Project Trace
INRECA Reuse
1.
Identify the application area of the experience
management project.
2.
Identify if an appropriate recipe is available.
3.
a) An appropriate recipe is available. The process model
contained in this recipe must be analyzed.
b) Analyze project descriptions on specific project level.
If a match is found, the reusability is analyzed.
c) Develop a project plan for the new project based on
the process model from the selected recipe.
INRECA Reuse
4.
a) The set of processes described at the generic level are
analyzed in the light of the new project to identify those
processes that are important.
b) Based on the selected processes, a new project plan
must be assembled.
5.
Execute the project by enacting the project plan.
Document the experience during the enactment of the
project.
Maintaining INRECA
The INRECA Maintenance Procedure
6. Analyze project trace
7. Add specific project
8. Create or update Recipe
9. Update Generic Level
Maintaining INRECA
6.
Analyze all the information collected about the project
and identify the actually enacted processes.
7.
Document the project by creating a specific project
description and add to the specific project level of
INRECA experience base.
8.
If the project falls under an existing recipe, update the
recipe if deviations from the original plan have been
noticed. Else, create a new recipe.
9.
Any new generic processes, methods or products
identified in the above steps that are of generic interest
are added to the common generic level.
Open issues in experience
maintenance
 Expressiveness of modelling concepts
• Knowledge conversion, learning
• Authority, ownership, location
• Viewpoints, scenarios, time, dynamics
 Analysis and design techniques
 Qualitative and quantitative reasoning
 Tools, visualization
 Reusable design knowledge, patterns
 Usage methodologies
Some Companies Using Experience
Maintenance Systems
Benetton
General Electric
National Bicycle
Netscape
Ritz Carlton
Agro Corp
Frito-Lay
Dow Chemical
Outokumppu
Skandia Switzerland
Steelcase
3M
Analog Devices
Boeing
Buckman Labs
Chaparral Steel
Ford Motor Co
Hewlett-Packard
Oticon
WM-data
McKinsey
Bain & Co
Chevron
British Petroleum
PLS-Consult
Skandia AFS
Telia
Celemi
Skandia
WM-data
Buckman Labs
IBM
Pfizer
WM-data
Affaersvaerlden
Hewlett-Packard
Honda
PLS-Consult
Xerox
Matsushita
Summary
What we’ve seen about experience maintenance…





What is it?
Why do wee need it?
What does it do?
How does an organization benefit from it?
The working of INRECA – an experience
maintenance/development system