KMASS: Knowledge Management at Scale and Speed

Organizations, including the military, store massive amounts of knowledge intended for human consumption, e.g., doctrine, policy, procedures, etc. Creating these documents, videos, and other modes is both expensive and time consuming. They are not structured or indexed to support rapid and appropriate application to particular tasks and may be inconsistent or confusing. Further, this knowledge must be augmented by local and timely knowledge appropriate to the particulars of a task, accounting for any unique context or situations. Capturing knowledge along with this context as it is created currently requires a dedicated effort on the part of the person performing the task, which often does not happen. Applying stored knowledge requires a user to know that it exists, where it exists, when it is needed and relevant, how to retrieve it, and how to locate the specifics in what typically is a multi-page document or several minute long video with audio. Applying stored knowledge may not always be possible given time constraints.

The Knowledge Management at Scale and Speed (KMASS) program aims to research, develop, integrate, evaluate, and demonstrate underlying technology that will enable effective use of documented knowledge, acquisition of new knowledge as part of regular workflows, and application of useful knowledge when and where it is required and with necessary granularity. KMASS technology seeks to scale to a broad set of tasks and contexts across an organization by collecting and modifying knowledge “in-the-flow” as part of regular task execution and applying the knowledge documented for one purpose to other purposes as appropriate. The goal of the KMASS program is to deliver user specific knowledge “nuggets” that are useful for a current task—whether the knowledge is requested or not by the user—exactly when needed, while avoiding irrelevant or already known information. This concept is a core tenet of KMASS and may be referred to as the “JustINs” – i.e., just in time, just enough, and just for me.¹ KMASS systems also will contain a persistent knowledge store comprising source documents in human understandable form in multiple modalities (e.g., text, videos, presentations, etc.), augmented with appropriate tags and indexed for identification, retrieval, linking, and application that will update at the speed of task performance. KMASS requires advances in three key complementary areas: organizing background knowledge, capturing local knowledge, and disseminating contextualized knowledge usefully, appropriately, and on time.

¹Rosenberg, M. J. (2001). E-learning: Strategies for delivering knowledge in the digital age. New York: McGraw-Hill