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In Practice

Published October 2007

U.S. Army: Sharing Lessons from the Field

  Kellye Whitney

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It began gradually, organically. Some young, noncommissioned officers wanted to share their experiences, talk about their jobs and learn from one another. At first, they met in person, but as their group became larger and outgrew a local venue, their connection expanded to the Internet, and the U.S. Army’s first community of practice was born.

“What had been going on for about five years in a number of different Web boards and discussion forums, this group of officers put some form to using commercial, free, on-the-Web software,” said Michael Prevou, senior knowledge adviser to the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge Management Systems and founder and president of Strategic Knowledge Solutions. “They developed an Army community of practice focused on being a company commander. We know that today as companycommand.com.”

Prevou said this grassroots effort began a widespread axis of communities of practice, and other departments quickly took advantage of the inexpensive, user-friendly method to connect Army personnel. The forums that sprang up also came at a perfect time to aid the organization in
managing the glut of information it was getting from electronic command and control systems.

“Just after the war started with Afghanistan and Iraq, somewhere in the 2003 to 2004 time frame, we started to notice that our organizational structures within the Army needed help managing the knowledge being generated and captured,” Prevou said. “It was also about lessons learned, and I think this was one of the big drivers on this sort of second axis — how do we get a lesson from a patrol in the field and share that lesson with the rest of the Army very, very quickly, not so the next unit can have it six months or a year from now, but so that the next patrol can have it hours from now?”

In 2004, Prevou said Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, then commander on the ground in Iraq, funded a program to formalize the Army’s organizational knowledge requirements and develop the procedures and people needed to help the Army manage knowledge more effectively. This effort became known as the Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS).

In addition to the more visible benefits regarding knowledge management, such as reducing time from months to hours to share field lessons, Prevou said the formal adoption of communities of practice also enabled Army personnel to learn better.

“What are the tools that I need to do my job? Where do I find them? How do I get that information? Where do I keep it? How do I share it with other practitioners doing my job?” he said. “Then, there’s the ever-present and continuing need for leader development and what we call professional forums. Whether they are cooks, mechanics, company commanders or operations officers in a particular size unit, each has specific job requirements. We have built the structure for these professional forums around those practitioners and the jobs that they do.”

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