Presented by Sufiet Erlita, Manager, Data and Information Services, CIFOR-ICRAF, on the ITPC side event “Could a virtual collaborative platform help to preserve tropical peatlands?” at the XV World Forestry Congress, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 5 May 2022.

1. Managing lessons learned through
an enhanced information system
Sufiet Erlita
CIFOR–ICRAF (Center for International Forest Research–World
Agroforestry)

2. Poor management of lessons learned
• Information not fully
captured, analyzed, validated,
and deposited in a system
• Lessons learned difficult to
extract from a system
• Poor metadata quality
• Metadata often describe the
published document instead
of actual lesson learned
Identify lessons learned
and best practices:
 What went well?
 What did not go well?
 What could have been done
differently?
 What can we do differently
in future projects?
 What have we learned from
this project?
Problems
with
transfer

3. Loss of institutional knowledge
• Inability to acquire new knowledge that was previously
unknown or unavailable within the organization
• Access to lessons learned often limited to small groups of people
due to confidentiality, proprietary issues or unique knowledge-
based practices
• Lack of systematic and regular documentation of knowledge
gained from projects
• Organizational error management culture pivotal to process
lessons learned from failures and success

4. Systematic process for capturing of
lessons learned
• Knowledge gained from peatland projects available through a
lessons learned database
• Enriched metadata for capturing and documenting lessons learned to
enhance knowledge discovery and detection
• Robust knowledge infrastructure through a single unified platform
• Internal information silos unlocked and connected
• Codified and documented knowledge to help users make sense of the
information
• People connected through the lessons learned system for joint
problem-solving
• Standardized processes on using lessons learned by practitioners

5. ITPC Knowledge platform stucture
Lessons learned will be embedded in the project database

6. Streamlined knowledge acquisition
process for lessons learned
• Identifying issues
• Selecting issues for
prioritization
• Analyzing root causes
• Suggesting solutions
for prevention
and improvement
• Documenting the
resulting lessons
learned
Work
practice &
experience
Processing
& reflection
Systematic
documentation
Information
systems
Distribution, access,
retrieval & use
Acquiring
lessons
learned

7. The structure
• Title and short description of the projects
• Information on how can other replicate success or improve the project
• Information on the best practice for the project/initiative
• Information will be categorized into topic cluster and supported by keywords
to help in searching

8. Sufiet Erlita
CIFOR - ICRAF
Thank you.