Using a lessons learned process to develop and maintain institutional memory and intelligence

The process of collecting, disseminating, and applying lessons learned (LL) is critical to the development and maintenance of any organization's institutional memory and intelligence, perhaps its most important resource. This is especially true for the NASA Ames Research Center (ARC), a research and development organization that develops systems meant to operate in high risk environments. However, the ARC environment being extremely diversified posed several challenges for implementing this process. These included; limited resources, employee turn over, many diverse communities of practice using unique sets of nomenclature, and employee anxiety over identifying problems or criticizing their organization. Thus, the Center developed a LL process based on interviews that successfully addressed these challenges and increased its LL submittal rate from two to thirty per year. In particular, it was found that the key to a successful LL program was the process of decomposition and re-integration of tacit (as represented by the anecdotal and contextual) with explicit information throughout the collection and dissemination steps. Furthermore, it was found that interviewers possessing corporate and technical experience/knowledge/access and excellent writing abilities were necessary for success. This combination of skills enabled the interviewer to accurately capture the LL explicit information while maintaining as much of the tacit as possible. In addition, by choosing interviewers that were involved in Center wide activities, the propagation of the tacit information was ensured. These findings in addition to the tools used to manage both the process and the LL will be described in his paper