Many of us have wondered what happens to European R&D projects in the afterlife of the project. Therefore, members of the RIMSAT project (ended in March 2004) had a conversation recently to share experiences.

[For a little background, the main deliverables of the RIMSAT project were (a)a methodology for collecting and managing lessons learned from industrial fires and (b)a prototype decision support system to help firefighters to use those lessons during subsequent incidents.]

A year later, we wanted to know how our research had been used by the public or the consortium partners. On the whole, the outcomes were positive:

1) The West Midlands Fire Brigade(WMFS) has used the RIMSAT methodology to develop a brigade-wide knowledge base. All WMFS firefighters can create “units of experience” (lessons learned) and share them via an intranet library. The user population has largely embraced the initiative and the system will soon be accessible during incidents (as opposed to just for training). The search and update of the system will also soon be enhanced with the integration of Kaidara’s case-based reasoning tool Kaidara Advisor. A screenshot of a unit of experience can be seen below.

2) Kaidara and WMFS have re-united in a “son-of-RIMSAT” project called AMIRA that is exploring ways of making a knowledge-based decision support systems available to mobile workers through speech dialogue technology. This research builds on and complements the research done in the RIMSAT project and enjoys the participation of Daimler-Chrysler, the UK Fire Service College, the University of Trier, and FAST.

3) The University of Girona has continued their research on a method developed during the RIMSAT project that enables the improvement of case-based reasoning accuracy by automatically taking into account the relative importance of certain search criteria.

4) Kaidara and Teradyne have also benefited from the relationship developed during RIMSAT to create a joint business proposal in the automotive sector.

5) Nemesia has worked with several chemical companies and a research university to develop an audit tool for identifying knowledge management problems that could impact industrial safety. Like RIMSAT, this research helps Nemesia’s consultants to explore new approaches to tackling organizational problems in industry.

6) The KM & Critical Incident Management SIG (this forum!), which was created by the RIMSAT project, is still alive and occasionally bringing together top experts from the field to discuss issues related to the sharing of knowledge in safety-critical domains.

7) The RIMSAT book “Learning from Critical Incidents” is purchased from time to time by managers in organizations that deal with critical incidents.

As KM professionals, we know that the failures are at least as important as the successes, so here are the things that we would try to remedy if we were to do it all over again:

1) One of the main technical innovations of the project has not been capitalized upon. RIMSAT spent a great deal of time and energy on the integration of case-based reasoning(CBR) and model-based reasoning(MBR) through a technique called that we called a “relevance network”. Though the University of Girona has continued research on the method, it is not currently being used by any of the partners. From one perspective, this is an acceptable outcome, as the RIMSAT project was always intended to be a pure R&D project ending with a prototype that would not be operational. However, some of the partners believe that more could have been done to improve knowledge sharing in the fire service if there had been less emphasis on this technical innovation and more emphasis on the application and adaptation of existing technologies to a challenging domain.

2) Though the West Midlands Fire Service embraced the knowledge management processes and techniques developed during the RIMSAT project, an inter-brigade knowledge sharing network has not been created. The consortium was hoping that the CIM SIG would provide a foundation for such collaboration but at the present time, that collaboration is still minimal. Nevertheless, some separate initiatives, such as www.firefighternearmiss.com, have taken alternative but important steps in the right direction.

The big question is, how do we further build on the successes of the RIMSAT project and avoid repeating (or continuing) the errors? Any thoughts?