The Wiki IETM

The current generation of United States (US) Navy and Marine Corps interactive electronic technical manuals (lETM's) are designed to provide maintainers with sufficient technical information to facilitate repairs at the organizational level of maintenance (O-level). Before use at the O-level, the lETM's are validated. However, practical situations arise which are not covered in sufficient detail by an IETM. In these situations, maintainers must rely on their own knowledge and experience to facilitate a successful repair. The larger body of navy maintainers cannot easily benefit from a single maintainer's practical lessons learned. No medium currently exists to facilitate timely knowledge-sharing. The naval air systems command (NAVAIR) utilizes the Technical Publications Deficiency Reporting (TPDR) program for reporting deficiencies in technical manuals and taking corrective action. However, in the case of non-safety-related deficiencies, this program takes too much time to be of immediate use to a maintainer. A "wiki" is a type of Web-based document that allows participants to easily add and edit content. It is especially suited for collaborative writing. This paper describes one mechanism for leveraging the wiki concept to allow maintainers to communicate with each other regarding non-safety-related maintenance issues via editable web pages outside of and in addition to current validated technical manuals. A wiki IETM has been created by the integrated diagnostics and automated test systems (IDATS) team at NAVAIR Lakehurst to demonstrate this concept. Experiments were carried out in which participants were asked to complete a laboratory task following a procedure created by the authors. A control group was asked to follow the procedure as it was written. Another group was given the benefit of using the wiki comments in addition to the procedure. The experiences of both groups were then compared. This effort has shown that it is useful to establish a Navy-wide forum through which maintainers can quickly communicate lessons learned using the wiki philosophy.