Experience Maintenance

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Experience Maintenance
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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!

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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

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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.

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What is the role of knowledge in IS, and IS
development?
Update Experience Base
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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
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Data to Knowledge
Very Valuable!
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Experience Maintenance Cycle
Collect
Identify
Classify
Create
Organize/ Store
Share/ Disseminate
Use/Exploit
Access
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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

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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

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What does an Experience Management System Share
Skills Experiences
Reflections Lessons
Memoirs Technical advice
Experts intuition Case studies
Best practices Methodologies
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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

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INRECA
INRECA
Company 1
Company 4
Company 3
Company 2
Company N

EMA 1
EMA 2
EMA 3
EMA 4
EMA N

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INRECA
Product 1
EMA 1
Product 2
Company 1
Product 3
. . .
Product N
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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

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INRECA Process Model

• The INRECA Process Model has 3 main components
• Process Describes what should be done
• Method Describes how to do it
• Product Describes what is output of the process

Input Product
Output Product
Process
Simple Method
Complex Method
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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.

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INRECA Experience Base
Building blocks general purpose approach
Common Generic Level
Recipe 2
Recipe 1
Recipe N
Cookbook level

App. 1
App. 2
App. 3
App. N

Specific Project Level
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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

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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
  organizations 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

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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

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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.

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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
• Generic Process Description Sheet
• Generic Product Description Sheet
• Generic Simple Method Description Sheet
• Generic Complex Method Description Sheet
• Specific Process Description Sheet
• Specific Product Description Sheet
• Specific Simple Method Description Sheet
• Specific Complex Method Description Sheet

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INRECA Process Description Sheet
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INRECA Reuse

• The INRECA Reuse Procedure

• Characterize New
• Project

2. Recipe Available?
3a.Analyze Process From Recipe
4a. Analyze Process From Common Generic Level
3b. Select Similar Specific Project
4b. Develop Project Plan by Combining Processes
3c.Develop Project Plan by Reuse
5. Enact Project Record Project Trace
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INRECA Reuse

• Identify the application area of the experience
  management project.
• Identify if an appropriate recipe is available.
• 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.

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INRECA Reuse

• 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.

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Maintaining INRECA

• The INRECA Maintenance Procedure

6. Analyze project trace
7. Add specific project
8. Create or update Recipe
9. Update Generic Level
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Maintaining INRECA

1. Analyze all the information collected about the
   project and identify the actually enacted
   processes.
2. Document the project by creating a specific
   project description and add to the specific
   project level of INRECA experience base.
3. 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.
4. Any new generic processes, methods or products
   identified in the above steps that are of generic
   interest are added to the common generic level.

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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

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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
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Summary

• What weve 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