Experts Are Only Human:
Expert troubleshooters, being human, suffer from human weaknesses. Here are two important ones, as related to Differential Diagnosis. These weaknesses were originally identified in the 1980s by studying how doctors diagnose, but they are still valid today, and they apply generally to experts in any complex domain.
“Availability”. An Expert can recall an experience only what is in his memory. If he himself has not experienced or learned of a problem, it will not be available to him for consideration during troubleshooting.
“Anchoring”. If a confident expert believes he knows the cause of a problem, there is a strong tendency to seize pre-maturely on that conclusion, in which case only supporting symptoms are acknowledged, and potentially conflicting symptoms are discounted as unimportant.
SpotLight is a powerful differential diagnosis engine that counters these weaknesses.
- It reasons upon a knowledgebase containing the collective experience of an entire community of users, thereby resolving the “availability” concern.
- All candidate solutions are kept in front of the user in a list ranked according to how each matches the reported symptoms as queried by SpotLight, thereby resolving the “anchoring” concern.
- Questions are asked to actively confirm or refute the leading hypothesis, further discouraging anchoring.
©2008 CaseBank Technologies Inc.
Here's an example of how the CaseBank solutions can save time and money. An airliner was ready to take off when a problem was discovered: there was no airflow in the cabin. Although it was obvious that something was wrong, the aircraft's built-in test systems showed everything to be working correctly. The flight had to be canceled while repair technicians investigated the problem. Three hours later, a technician found the source of the fault - a loose pipe fitting in the tail of the aircraft. Once the fault was located, it was repaired in a matter of minutes and the aircraft was released for service.
In the next few months, at that same airline, the same problem occurred three more times on different aircraft at different locations. In each case it was necessary to cancel the flight. None of the technicians assigned to find the problem knew that it had occurred before. If CaseBank solutions had been available, the guided diagnostic troubleshooting would have alerted them to the findings of the technician who solved the original problem, and the last three cancellations could have been avoided, with a significant saving in cost and customer satisfaction for the airline.
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