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 only recall an experience that 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.
In February 2000, an unusual brake problem grounded a British Airways Concorde flight from London to New York at a total cost to BA operations of over $800,000. The fault turned out to be a simple sensor failure. It took a whole day to troubleshoot, but the fix was simple and fast once they found the cause. Later, when a case history was forwarded to BA's commercial partner, Air France, BA was astonished by their reply: "We know - the same thing happened to us last year - we sent you a report on it".
The costly delay would have been avoided if the British Airways technician in London had been shown the story about Air France's experience when the problem symptoms first appeared. That's what the ADDS Service does.
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