How will Air Force Manage Knowledge in the Future?

Col. John Thompson is the Future Learning Advisor to the Air Education and Training Command (AETC) Director of Plans, Programs, Requirements, and Assessments. He is responsible for facilitating innovation across AETC’s recruiting, training and education mission.

Starting in the third grade, my daughters were taught to manage knowledge via web searches.

Knowledge management skills are critical in today’s work environment. The Air Force has multiple systems such as Air Force Knowledge Now, the Air Force Portal, and internal organization software and hardware systems that manage our knowledge.

How can we make those systems more efficient with the goal being to get the right “nugget” of knowledge to the end user as quickly as possible? Imagine if we had a high powered search engine that had a rating system similar to some major online sales companies so with a simple search you would have access to a filtered, prioritized, categorized listing of knowledge.

We have a similar information overload in learning management systems. My command, AETC, alone has at least 17 formal learning management systems.

To get to our “simple” goal, we first need the systems to talk to one another through service-oriented architecture (a way of designing systems composed of services that are invoked in a standard way). Then, we could have a program called the “Air Force Learning Environment” to collect the data and provide a single training jacket showing all the training and education an Airman has completed. The training jacket would be a single source document where you could tell if you are ready to deploy, what schools you are qualified for, and what ancillary training is due. Finally, we need to write policy that prohibits the proliferation of learning management systems to start a consolidation.

The end result probably is not a single learning management system, but it should be significantly less than the 17 we now have in AETC.

This is the fourth post in Col. Thompson’s five-part series on advanced learning technology. In his other posts, Col. Thompson explored mobile learning systems, virtual reality, and simulations and gaming.