Diagnosing the Lessons Learned Center’s Own Findability Problem: An IT Infrastructure Assessment for Wildland Fire Safety.
National Wildfire Coordinating Group · Government
Baseline Assessment, Search Evaluation, and a Multi-Year Modernization Roadmap
Executive summary
The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (WFLLC) exists to give the wildland fire community a single, trusted place to find safety knowledge — after-action reviews, incident analyses, and hard-won lessons that keep firefighters alive on the line. By 2010, the irony was that WFLLC’s own digital infrastructure had become one of the hardest places to find anything. Four separate public-facing websites, built on custom .NET code and split across two outside hosting providers, had grown up independently, each with its own navigation, its own search box, and no shared metadata tying them together. NWCG engaged Solutions KM to lead a multi-year modernization effort, and Solutions KM brought in Iknow as a subcontractor for the technical assessment that would set the direction for everything that followed.
Over three months, Iknow assessed WFLLC’s four websites — evaluating functionality, information architecture, search performance, and content quality — and translated the findings into prioritized technology recommendations, an implementation roadmap, and UI mockups for a consolidated future portal. The assessment gave NWCG and WFLLC leadership an evidence-based, board-ready case for replacing four fragmented, dated websites with a single, modern, metadata-driven knowledge portal built for the community’s safety mission.
Background & context
About the Client
Headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, WFLLC serves as the wildland fire community’s central repository for lessons learned, safety bulletins, and after-action reviews, supporting well over a million wildland firefighters and support personnel nationally, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. WFLLC operates under NWCG, the interagency body that sets training, qualification, and operational standards across the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and other federal, state, and tribal wildland fire agencies. The center remains active today, publishing its long-running Two More Chains newsletter — underscoring that findability has always been a safety issue, not merely a convenience.
Industry Context
Wildfire activity in the United States has only intensified since WFLLC’s original systems were built: recent fire seasons have produced tens of thousands of fires and millions of burned acres annually, with federal agencies mobilizing thousands of wildland firefighters each year to respond. For a community operating at that scale, a safety knowledge base that is slow or difficult to search is not a minor usability complaint — it affects how quickly a crew can locate a relevant lesson before it repeats itself in the field. By the early 2010s, government agencies were shifting away from custom-built websites toward commercial content management platforms and unified enterprise search — precisely the shift WFLLC needed to make.
Current Situation
NWCG awarded Solutions KM a multi-year contract in October 2010 to modernize WFLLC’s technology infrastructure, moving from custom, first-generation systems to a robust, scalable platform built on commercial software with ongoing maintenance. Solutions KM engaged Iknow as a subcontractor to lead the technical assessment anchoring the program, beginning with WFLLC’s four public-facing sites: WFLLC itself, My Fire Community, My Fire Videos, and the Incident Management Team (IMT) Center.
Problem / challenge
- No overarching technology strategy. WFLLC’s technology components appeared to have been selected principally on lowest cost, with no unifying architecture guiding the four websites’ growth.
- Fragmented, inconsistent infrastructure. The four sites ran on custom .NET applications with an MS SQL 2005 backend, split across two third-party, non-government hosts, with minimal integration beyond simple hyperlinks.
- Search and findability failures. Content lacked the structured metadata needed to power effective search, and the search functionality that did exist was not implemented correctly — undermining WFLLC’s mission of getting safety knowledge to the people who need it.
- A confusing, dated user experience. Inconsistent navigation, hundreds of broken links and missing images, and four different URLs diminished usability and WFLLC’s brand identity.
Project objectives
- Comprehensively assess all four WFLLC websites, covering functionality, design, operations, and maintenance.
- Identify the root causes of WFLLC’s search, navigation, and content-quality problems, grounded in direct evidence rather than assumption.
- Develop prioritized technology recommendations and a multi-year implementation roadmap for consolidating WFLLC’s digital properties.
- Produce UI wireframes and mockups for a redesigned, unified WFLLC portal to guide future development and secure stakeholder buy-in.
Iknow’s approach
How Iknow Structured the Work
Iknow structured the engagement as a rigorous, evidence-first assessment — establishing a documented current-state baseline before proposing any solution — reflecting Iknow’s implementation readiness assessment methodology for grounding a technology roadmap in how a platform is genuinely used and experienced, not just how it was designed to work.
Key Activities & Decisions
- Comprehensive current-state assessment. Iknow evaluated all four WFLLC websites end to end, examining functionality, design, information architecture, navigation, and search performance.
- End-user research. Iknow conducted end-user needs analysis, developed user personas, and ran interviews, requirements workshops, and design workshops with WFLLC stakeholders and the wildland fire community.
- Search and content diagnostics. Iknow evaluated WFLLC’s search implementation and metadata practices, identifying the gaps preventing users from reliably finding lessons-learned content.
- Technology and platform recommendations. Iknow recommended content enrichment to add structured metadata to WFLLC’s documents and videos, a reconfigured search engine tuned to that metadata, and consolidation of the four legacy sites into a single portal on a modern content management platform with managed hosting.
- Roadmap and UX deliverables. Iknow documented a three-phase roadmap — UX redesign, platform selection and implementation, and content migration and refresh — supported by wireframes and mockups for the new unified portal.
Stakeholders & Collaboration
Iknow served as subcontractor to Solutions KM, prime contractor on NWCG’s multi-year modernization contract, working directly with WFLLC stakeholders and end users throughout the assessment and design workshops.
Challenges & how Iknow overcame them
Diagnosing Root Causes Behind Four Independently Built Websites
With four websites built independently, on different technical foundations and hosted in different places, it would have been easy to treat each site’s problems as isolated bugs. Iknow instead treated the assessment as a single, unified diagnostic exercise — evaluating functionality, design, and operations consistently across all four properties — which surfaced the real root cause: the absence of any overarching technology strategy, not four unrelated sets of technical defects.
Turning a Safety Mission Into a Concrete Technology Business Case
WFLLC’s leadership needed more than a list of problems; they needed a defensible business case for a multi-year platform overhaul. Iknow addressed this by pairing its findings with a phased implementation roadmap and tangible UI mockups grounded in real end-user feedback — giving stakeholders a concrete, visual picture of the future state, not just a diagnosis of the present one.
Results & impact
Quantitative Outcomes
- Assessment scope: All four WFLLC public-facing websites comprehensively assessed across functionality, design, operations, and maintenance.
- Findings delivered: A documented set of root-cause findings, including search and metadata gaps, navigation inconsistencies, and infrastructure fragmentation.
- Roadmap delivered: A three-phase, multi-year implementation roadmap covering UX redesign, platform implementation, and content migration.
- Design deliverables: A full set of wireframes and screen mockups for a consolidated WFLLC portal, informed by end-user interviews and visioning sessions.
- Engagement duration: Initial three-month assignment, as part of a multi-year contract.
Qualitative Outcomes
WFLLC came away with a comprehensive assessment report, prioritized recommendations, and UI wireframes and mockups to guide its next-generation website — evidence Iknow delivered a genuinely actionable path forward, not just a diagnosis. The assessment gave NWCG and WFLLC leadership the evidence-based case needed to pursue funding and stakeholder approval, and WFLLC’s digital presence has since evolved toward the unified knowledge base the assessment first envisioned.
Timeline to Impact
Within a three-month engagement, Iknow moved WFLLC from four fragmented, undocumented websites to a fully diagnosed current state, a prioritized roadmap, and a visual blueprint for a unified portal — laying the groundwork for WFLLC’s subsequent, multi-year platform modernization.
Iknow’s capabilities demonstrated
Core Skills
- Implementation readiness assessment
- Enterprise search advisory
- Knowledge base and intranet design
- End-user research and requirements definition
Methods & Frameworks
- Current-state technology and content assessment
- Persona development and end-user needs analysis
- Phased implementation roadmap planning
Technologies & Tools
- Enterprise search evaluation and configuration
- Structured metadata and content classification for search relevance
- Content management platform selection and information architecture
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