Prior Art....
...a term unfamiliar to many actuaries
The actuarial profession has been accused of being insular. I wonder if it is an inherent character flaw.
I once attended an excellent team building course where the company organsing the event pointed out that a person's greatest strength in some situations could be their greatest weakness in others. For example, an underwriter may be highly praised for their attention to detail; never missing any crucial fact. But put them in future strategy meeting and their strength may be percieved as pickyness; they could be accused of holding up the process.
Actuaries are generally clever. And clever people like to solve problems; and they like people to know they have solved them. Being clever is a strength. But if it tends to make us want to start from scratch all the time then it is a weakness.
Prior Art is a term often used in the IT industry for finding examples where the problem or a similar problem has been solved before. The idea being that you start where they left off.
How many working parties start with a thorough search of what is already available? When faced with a problem at work, do we search the internet to see if the problem has already been solved? I suspect we are starting to; but we may need to do more of it.
...a link to knowledge management
Another way of looking at this (and the project as a whole) is as follows
If we have a particular problem, we might already know a way to solve that problem, or one like it. in other words have a technique which is familiar to us personally that we can use to solve this problem. This approach uses the least effort
If we don't have a method for solving the problem we might have some resource specific to the subject area which might highlight some appropriate technique for the particular problem. This requires some more effort, but is still not too bad.
If that fails then we might look for a resource in a less related area. This would take longer (as there is more stuff to search) or might require more customisation to the particular problem.
If that fails we need to attack the problem from scratch. This is a bespoke solution with all the problems and effort that requires.
Once you have tackles a problem, you might learn a new technique which might help you next time.
What we are trying to do is build a resourse of the second type, so that once one person learns something AND realises that it might be useful to others AND incorporates it into this resource EVERYONE can benefit.
Comments (6)
Anonymous said
at 12:27 pm on Mar 23, 2006
This is very interesting, and true from personal experience.
I remember a play on words (I think by Andrew Dlugolecki) about "Not Invented Here" and "NIH-ilism".
How do you develop proficiency in using other people's ideas? Strangely, you'd think the exams would teach us that but generally the urge to solve from first principles (as a basis for belief in the results as well) is much stronger...
Also, for "existing models or results" one might read "black box"!
Anonymous said
at 12:29 pm on Mar 23, 2006
Excellent thoughts! I really like the link to exams and if you look at the type of exams most of us will have done from the age of 18 onwards; they are likely in many cases to be the "first principles" type of exams - rather than evidence based.
"develop proficiency in using other people's ideas" - surely this is a key theme of knowledge management? Excellent.
Anonymous said
at 12:47 pm on Mar 23, 2006
There are lots of reasons as to how this arises. One view is that only original thought provides competetive advantage. Another is the reluctance to "copy" another person's ideas (school exams, or even copyright training might be the drivers here).
I tend to collect ideas that I find interesting, understanding what they might do and trying to think of where they might be useful. This gives me a resource to hunt through when I am faced with a new problem.
Anonymous said
at 3:04 pm on Mar 23, 2006
The idea of a personal resource is interesting. It would be great if this could be shared (via del.ico.us or blogging perhaps). I think Richard is right that using prior art is seen as "cheating" - and we must get over this!!
Anonymous said
at 8:20 am on Mar 27, 2006
One of my old maths teachers told me once "Lazyness can be a great virtue in a mathematician, if it means that you look hard for easy ways to do difficult things" I think I may have taken that to heart!
Anonymous said
at 9:49 am on Mar 27, 2006
My brother in law was recently involved in a company which suffered from this issue. They were writing software for mobile phones and trying to develop all of their own tools from scratch. Tom pointed out that there were ready-made open source tools available and that if they didn't use them they would never complete the project on time. They ignored him, but eventually they failed to deliver and the company failed not long afterwards.
The problem with the open source solution was that it was not completely bespoke to their requirements. It would, however, have been much simpler to adapt a tried and tested solution rather than create a new one.
I am a great believer in a "personal resource", but I think this wiki is a wonderful opportunity to create a "group resource", following in the IT world's open-source example.
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