Over a 40+ year career exploring human performance in socio-technical systems I have observed or participated in numerous work domain analyses using various forms of representations such as concept maps, flow diagrams, journey maps, and abstraction hierarchies. It has been obvious that the processes involved in collecting the data and constructing these representations have been enlightening for the people participating in the analyses. However, there is little evidence that anyone who did not participate in the research and generation processes gained much value from the products that were produced. Thus, future research teams rarely benefit from the work of prior teams. The new teams often have to start with a blank slate and collect their own data and create their own representations.
In 2008 we wrote a chapter in the book "Applications of Cognitive Work Analysis" (Bisantz & Burns) describing a process for creating a living database for archiving the products generated during Work Domain Analysis. We called this database - Integrated Constraint Evaluation (ICE). The general idea was to use the Abstraction Hierarchy to create an indexing system for storing all the products generated during Work Domain Analysis. These products could include raw data (e.g., transcriptions from interviews with domain experts, incident reports) and more abstracted data (e.g., concept maps, process diagrams, journey maps, prototypes).
Since writing the chapter we have been trying to find an organization willing to invest the resources to create something akin to ICE. However, the search has been in vane. It is hard to convince organizations that they own a work domain or that an upfront investment to build such a living database would payoff in the long run.
Perhaps, they're right. Or perhaps this is simply an idea that was ahead of its time. We wonder that in a world where people are investing in digital twins and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) AI architectures, whether an idea of creating a living Work Domain database might be seen as an essential or at least complementary component. This archive could help to document the underlying assumptions and rationality behind a particular technology represented by a digital twin. It could also provide a structure for a database that becomes a component in a RAG architecture.
Despite the lack of support, we remain convinced that the products of Work Domain Analysis could be valuable to organizations. It is a shame that organizations lose the potential value of those products when the people who generated them walk out the door.
This is something I faced during my thesis and could compare later after performing work domain analysis with other practitioners. I realised how explaining the rationale behind an existing abstraction hierarchy to someone is by no means comparable to building it together.
Funny enough, after internal discussion on how to capitalise on the different abstractions hierarchy built, we reached a similar idea. As we work on multiple instances of the same generic system, with each their own constraints, bringing together our work to define this generic system and understand (and formalise) how the constraint shape it stood out as the way to go. This was ever more alluring since we ended up analysing a system resulting on the “collision” of two generic systems.
We thought of including colleagues working on formal knowledge, as well as colleagues working with other human factors means of analysis to bridge the gaps but ended up in the same situation, where everyone agrees on the potential, but nothing is engaged as the instantaneous value is low.
This subject truly needs to be formalised with an official work group to make it more visible.