Knowledge Management at NASA: Supporting Missions and Collaboration

1. Knowledge Management at NASA:Supporting Missions and Collaboration Jeanne Holm Chief Knowledge Architect NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory December 5, 2007 JPL CL#07-3667

2. Why Is KM Critical to NASA? Knowledge management is getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and helping people create knowledge and share and act upon information in ways that will measurably improve the performance of an organization and its partners • Constantly challenged to document and integrate our lessons to effectively manage the risk involved in space exploration and human space flight • By its nature, NASA’s employees have specialized knowledge • Our goal is to share knowledge with each other and with the public • To ensure safe flight and respond to issues raised by CAIB • The workforce in the Agency is aging • The Administration will adopt information technology systems to capture some of the knowledge and skills of retiring employees. Knowledge management systems are just one part of an effective strategy that will help generate, capture, and disseminate knowledge and information that is relevant to the organization’s mission. President’s Management Agenda NASA KM Team

3. Training, Services, Strategic Tools Ownership, Sharing and Reuse, Incentives and Rewards Culture Knowledge Management Supporting Services Knowledge Architecture Access Methods, Building Blocks, Service Bases, Standards Knowledge Resources, Repositories, Content, Context, Directories, Interoperability IT Infrastructure KM Critical Success Factors NASA KM Team

4. Building the NASA KM Team • Find good solutions, fill the gaps, and build a federation of resources to support our missions and research communities • Supports and enables other initiatives by advocating best practices, promoting good solutions, and building infrastructure and applications to bridge distributed systems • Infuse new ideas or needed technology • NASA’s Knowledge Management Team is chartered by • Chief Information Officer • Co-sponsored by the Chief Engineer • Close partnerships with Human Resources • 115 team members are from across the Agency, ranging from system architects to authors to anthropologists • Actively share and benchmark with other Agencies, the National laboratory community, and academia NASA KM Team

5. Sustain NASA’s knowledge across missions and generations • Identify and capture the information that exists across the Agency • Help people find, organize, and share the knowledge we already have • Efficiently manage NASA’s knowledge resources Key Areas for NASA’s KM Strategy Increase collaboration and to facilitate knowledge creation and sharing Develop techniques and tools to enable teams and communities to collaborate across the barriers of time and space NASA KM Team

6. Framework for KM at NASA Sharing and Using Knowledge People Process Technology • Enable remote collaboration • Support communities of practice • Reward and recognize knowledge sharing • Encourage storytelling • Enhance knowledge capture • Manage information • Enhance system integration and data mining • Utilize intelligent agents • Exploit expert systems and semantic technologies Supporting Activities Education and Training Human Resources IT Infrastructure Security NASA KM Team

7. Knowledge Management Environment • Integrating knowledge management into our engineering and project management lifecycle NASA personnel Contractors Academia Global Partners Public NASA Portal Inside NASA NEN Lessons Learned Strategic Comm. Comm. of Practice Lessons Learned Process Content Management System Experts NASA KM Team

8. KM Team Activities NASA KM Team

9. KM System Milestones NASA KM Team

10. The NASA Public Portal • Designed as a dramatic, interactive interface to NASA by the public, kids, media, educators, and students, integrating web resources • Our known challenges included • An evolving architecture, with a 4-week deadline for deployment • Highly interactive and engaging • Content migration from top NASA sites • Quick and easy navigation for our many audiences • Our unknown challenge • Hours after deployment, Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy would occur • Redesign Portal immediately and supported outreach to the public • Landings of the Mars Exploration Rovers on the Red Planet became the largest online event to date • Streaming live coverage, dynamic and distributed publishing, and automatic image upload brought fresh images within minutes of the spacecraft sending • People reached: 160 million people in 2006 NASA KM Team

11. Inside NASA • For employees and partners • Customizable • Access to e-mail • Secure instant messaging • Collaborative tools • Application integration • Wikis and blogs (e.g. Shana Dale) • People reached: >5000 per month accessing ~1.5M pieces of information NASA KM Team

12. Emergency Operations Support • InsideNASA EOC site is available to all NASA centers to coordinate information before, during, and after a crisis • The EOC page has emergency preparedness links to educate employees on how they may be best prepared at work and home • Central communications area for regional emergency operations personnel and managers to communicate with employees and critical operations personnel • Is always on, always accessible--even when Centers are closed or have outages • Has provided support since 2005 hurricane system, including hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, JSC shooting, and others NASA KM Team

13. Next Step: Creating a Learning Organization • Integrated approach to ensuring best practices and key lessons learned are applied on missions • NASA Engineering Network (Office of the Chief Engineer) • Capitalizes on best ways engineers currently work, while solving cultural and process areas that NASA for which has been criticized • Builds on shared infrastructure and seamlessly integrates with NASA initiatives, distributed systems, and KM infrastructure • Distinguished by integrating lessons and learnings that come out of engineering discussions and repositories into day-to-day engineering processes, policies, and training curriculum • Integrates information broadly from academia, industry, contractors, government, and NASA personnel • Portals to organize community and individual access to information • Collaborative tools expanded for secure access with our partners • Expertise and expert directories organized around sharing knowledge person-to-person over virtual social networks • Metasearch across distributed repositories • People reached: 303,672 page views in 2007 NASA KM Team

14. Learning occurs when people can find and share knowledge easily and act upon it Center Lessons Learned NASA Lessons Learned Interagency/Aerospace Lessons Learned Community Portals Collaborative Tools Expertise Locator Competency Management System Exploration Systems Project Environment Metasearch Training Policies and Procedures Feedback Feedback Advanced Engineering Tools Document and Data Repositories Responsibility Areas NASA Engineering Network—Blue Agency Resources—Green NASA KM Team

15. Accessing and Gathering Lessons Learned • Formal lessons are gathered from Centers and key reviews • Lessons are vetted and validated • Affected policies and procedures are changed as needed • Subscriptions allow new lessons to come just in time • Managed by Office of Chief Engineer • Part of the NEN Built on same infrastructure as NASA’s public Portal Lessons are solicited from academia, industry, and global partners NASA KM Team

16. Communities for Collaboration Find information Integration to document management Saved searches and subscriptions Discussions and Q&A Key lessons are integrated into the community NASA KM Team

17. Discovering Knowledge in New Ways • POPS • Search for experts based on location, publications, projects, organization, and skills • Integrates social networks to show the searcher’s relationship to the people found • Semantic SEEK • Searching engineering expertise and knowledge (MIT, Sir Tim Berners-Lee) • Semantic query to dynamically integrate distributed content and context • Focusing on lunar mission data from international partners • Explorer Island--Second Life immersive avatar-driven environment for collaboration and engineering • Mission support (modeling and simulation, collaboration, proposal development, and more); outreach; education; and training NASA KM Team

18. Looking Ahead • We are working on a variety of new initiatives that are still being formulated, including • Agency-wide knowledge architecture • Update structured approach to integrating knowledge for mission success • Accelerating learning • Integrate approach to e-learning and support to the project managers • Supporting engineering excellence • Drive multi-generational learning with the NASA Engineering Network • Facilitate communities of practice with NESC technical experts • Embed lessons learned into engineering practices • Managing knowledge for aerospace and government • Chair, International Astronautics and Aeronautics (IAA) (UN) Working Group on KM for Aerospace • Governing Board, Federal KM Working Group, capturing knowledge (500 members) NASA KM Team

19. Knowledge Management Roadmap Modeling Expert Knowledge • Systems model experts’ patterns and behaviors to gather knowledge implicitly • Seamless knowledge exchange with robotic explorers • Planetary explorers contribute to their successor’s design from experience and synthesis • Knowledge systems collaborate with experts for new research Capturing Knowledge • Knowledge gathered anyplace from hand-held devices using standard formats on interplanetary Internet • Expert systems on spacecraft analyze and upload data • Autonomous agents operate across existing sensor and telemetry products • Industry and academia supply spacecraft parts based on collaborative designs derived from NASA’s knowledge system Integrating Distributed Knowledge • Instrument design is semi-automatic based on knowledge repositories • Mission software auto-instantiates based on unique mission parameters • KM principals are part of NASA culture and supported by layered COTS products • Remote data management allows spacecraft to self-command Enables real-time capture of tacit knowledge from experts on Earth and in permanent outposts Sharing Knowledge • Adaptive knowledge infrastructure is in place • Knowledge resources identified and shared appropriately • Timely knowledge gets to the right person to make decisions • Intelligent tools for authoring through archiving • Cohesive knowledge development between NASA, its partners, and customers • Interstellar missions • Permanent lunar and Martian colonies Enables capture of knowledge at the point of origin, human or robotic, without invasive technology Enables seamless integration of systems throughout the world and with robotic spacecraft • Mars robotic outposts • Constellation Program • Terrestrial Planet Finder Enables sharing of essential knowledge to complete Agency tasks • Kepler (galactic survey) • JASON (oceanography) • Phoenix to Mars • Constellation Program • International Space Station • MarsNet • Mars Exploration Rovers • Space Interferometry Mission 2003 2007 2025 2010

20. Thanks! • Many thanks to my colleagues on the NASA KM Team who contributed to these ideas and to the excellent work they are doing in implementing knowledge management solutions at NASA • If you have any additional questions, contact me • Jeanne.Holm@jpl.nasa.gov (818) 354-8282 • More information can be found about • NASA’s KM program: http://km.nasa.gov • NASA’s portal: http://www.nasa.gov NASA KM Team