Knowledge Management at NASA:

Supporting Missions and Collaboration

Keri Murphy and Jeanne Holm

Knowledge Management and Collaboration Technologies
NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory

November 5, 2008
 KM Why Is KM Critical to NASA?
Collaborate
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.
partners
Communicate
Š Constantly challenged to document and integrate our lessons to effectively
manage the risk involved in space exploration and human space flight
Š By its nature, NASA’s employees have specialized knowledge
Š Our goal is to share knowledge with each other and with the public
Innovate Š To ensure safe flight
g and respond
p to issues raised byy CAIB
Š The workforce in the Agency is aging

Š The Administration will adopt information technology systems to capture some of the
knowledge and skills of retiring employees. Knowledge management systems are just
Motivate
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
g Agenda
g

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 2

 KM Generations Share Differently
Collaborate Š 1930-50’s era generation
– Focus on society
– Friendships are forged through adversity
Š 1960-70’s era generation
Communicate
– Focus on community
– Friendships forged through identification with a cause
Š 1980-90’s era generation
Innovate
– Focus on the individual
– Friendships
F i d hi forged
f d through
th h individual
i di id l goall accomplishment
li h t
Š 2000’s era generation
– Focus on common interests
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– Friendships are created or thrive virtually…
Š This leads us to the need to share across generations and
communicate in different modalities

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 3

 KM KM Critical Success Factors
Collaborate
Training, Ownership,
Culture
Services, Sharing and Reuse,
Strategic Tools Incentives and Rewards
Communicate

Supporting Knowledge Knowledge

Services Architecture
Innovate Management

Access Methods, Knowledge Resources,

IT
Motivate Building Blocks, Infrastructure Repositories, Content,
Context, Directories,
Service Bases,
Interoperability
Standards

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 4

 KM Building the NASA KM Team
Collaborate Š 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
Communicate practices, promoting good solutions, and building infrastructure
and applications to bridge distributed systems
– Infuse
f new id
ideas or needed
d d technology
h l
Š NASA’s Knowledge Management Team is chartered by
Innovate – Chief Information Officer
– Co-sponsored by the Chief Engineer
– Close partnerships with Human Resources
Š 115 team members are from across the Agency, ranging
Motivate from system architects to authors to anthropologists
Š Actively share and benchmark with other Agencies, the
National laboratory community
community, and academia

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 5

 KM Key Areas for NASA’s KM Strategy
Collaborate
Sustain
S t i NASA’s
NASA’ kknowledge
l d across
missions and generations
Identifyy and capture
p the information
that exists across the Agency
Communicate

Help
pppeople
p find,, organize,
g , and share
the knowledge we already have
Innovate
Efficiently manage NASA’s
knowledge resources

Increase collaboration and to facilitate

knowledge creation and sharing
Motivate
Develop techniques and tools to enable
teams and communities to collaborate
across the
th barriers
b i off time
ti andd space

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 6

 KM Framework for KM at NASA
Collaborate
Sharing and Using Knowledge
People Process Technology
Communicate
• Enable remote • Enhance • Enhance system
collaboration knowledge
g integration
g and data
• Support communities of capture mining
practice • Manage • Utilize intelligent
Innovate • Reward and recognize information agents
knowledge sharing • Exploit expert
• Encourage storytelling systems and semantic
technologies

Supporting Activities
Motivate
Education and IT Infrastructure Human Resources Security
Training

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 7

 KM Knowledge Management Environment
Collaborate Š Integrating knowledge management into our engineering
and project management lifecycle

Communicate NASA Global

Contractors Academia Public
personnel Partners

Innovate

NASA Inside Lessons Strategic

Lessons Comm. of
NEN
Portal NASA Learned Comm.
Learned Practice

Motivate

Content
Management Process
ocess Experts
pe s
System
July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 8
 NASA KM System Milestones
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Cus- • Public • NASA • Engineers • Disciplines • Engineers • Mission teams • Engineers and
tomers • Educators personnel • Project teams • Communities and partners • Gen Y/M partners
Stake- • CIO • CIO • Engineers • Employees • Scientists • Constellation • External
holders • Public Affairs • Strategic • Mission • Senior • Peer-to-peer • Public Affairs partners
• Education Communica- directorates management collaboration • Missions • Knowledge
tions workers
(Centers)
System • NASA Portal • InsideNASA • NASA Eng.
Eng • Communities • InsideNASA • NASASphere • International
• KM for Space • Research Web Network of practice v.2 • Explorer Ontology for
(UN) • Emergency • Collab 2.0 Island Space
operations • Extranet • Collab 3.0
Tools • Digital Asset • +SunOne, • +NASA • +Semantic • +Social • +Virtual • +SharePoint,
M t (eTouch),
Mgmt ( T h) W bE eRoom
WebEx, R X
Xerox (NX)
(NX), web,
b W3C networking,
t ki worlds
ld (Second
(S d RSS metadata
RSS, t d t
Vignette, Verity, Jabber (instant standards, Web 2.0, next- Life), standards,
Urchin messaging) expertise generation SocialCast, enhanced
locator collaboration, SamePage collaboration
(Jspace) Enterprise (wiki, blog), processes
Architecture Apache

Hostin O/S Applications and storage Hosting (SunGard) Caching (Akamai) and streaming Service desk (eTouch)
g

9
 KM The NASA Public Portal
Collaborate Š Designed as a dramatic, interactive interface to NASA by the public,
kids, media, educators, and students, integrating web resources
Š Our known challenges included
– An evolving architecture, with a 4-week deadline for deployment
Communicate • Highly interactive and engaging
• Content migration from top NASA sites
• Quick and easy navigation for our many audiences
Š Our unknown challenge
Innovate – Hours after deployment, Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy would occur
– Redesign Portal immediately and supported outreach to the public
Š Landings of the Mars Exploration Rovers on the Red Planet became
the largest online event to date
Motivate
– Streaming live coverage, dynamic and distributed publishing, and
automatic image upload brought fresh images within minutes of the
spacecraft sending
Š People
P l reached:
h d 240 million
illi people
l in
i 2007

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 10

 KM Inside NASA
Collaborate Š For employees and
partners
Š Customizable
Š Access to e-mail
Communicate
Š Secure instant messaging
Š Collaborative tools
Š Application integration
Innovate Š Wikis and blogs (e.g.
Sh
Shana D
Dale)
l )
Š People reached: >7500
per month accessing
~1.5M
1 5M pieces
i off
Motivate
information

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 11

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

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 12

 KM Next Step: Creating a Learning Organization
Collaborate Š 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
Communicate cultural and process areas that NASA for which has been criticized
• Builds on shared infrastructure and seamlessly integrates with
NASA initiatives
initiatives, distributed systems,
systems and KM infrastructure
• Distinguished by integrating lessons and learnings that come out of
engineering discussions and repositories into day-to-day engineering
Innovate 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
p for secure access with our ppartners
Motivate – Expertise and expert directories organized around sharing knowledge
person-to-person over virtual social networks
– Metasearch across distributed repositories
– People reached: 303,672
303 672 page views in 2007

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 13

 KM Learning occurs when people can find and share knowledge easily
and act upon it
Collaborate

Center Lessons Learned NASA Lessons Learned Interagency/Aerospace Lessons Learned

Communicate
Expertise Community Portals
Locator Collaborative Tools

Competency
Innovate Exploration Systems
Management
Project
j Environment
System

Metasearch

Policies
P li i and
d
Training
Feedback Procedures
Motivate

Advanced Feedback
Engineering
Document and Data Repositories Tools
Responsibility Areas
NASA Engineering Network—Blue Agency Resources—Green

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 14

 KM Accessing and Gathering Lessons Learned
Collaborate Š Formal lessons are Built on same
infrastructure as
gathered from Centers NASA’s public Portal
and key reviews
Š Lessons are vetted and
Communicate
validated
Š Affected policies and
procedures are changed
Innovate
as needed
Š Subscriptions
S b i ti allow
ll new
lessons to come just in
time
Motivate Š Managed by Office of
Chief Engineer
Lessons are solicited from
Š Part of the NEN academia industry,
academia, industry and
global partners

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 15

 KM Communities for Collaboration
Find
Collaborate Integration information
to document
management

Saved
Communicate searches and
subscriptions Discussions
and Q&A

Innovate

Key lessons are

integrated into
th community
the it
Motivate

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 16

 KM Finding NASA Experts via Social Networks
Collaborate
Pulls expert
attributes from
existing
systems

Communicate

Innovate Sort and

Social b
browse
network map location,
shows project, and
possible expertise
experts in
relation
l i to
Motivate searcher

Š POPS ((People,
p , Organizations,
g , Projects,
j , and Skills),
), led
by Andy Schain
July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 17
 KM Discovering Knowledge in New Ways
Š Semantic SEEK
Collaborate
– Searching engineering expertise and
knowledge (MIT, Sir Tim Berners-Lee)
• Semantic query to dynamically integrate
di ib d content andd context
distributed
• Focusing on lunar mission data from
Communicate international partners
Š Explorer Island--Second Life immersive
avatar-driven
t di environment
i t for
f collaboration
ll b ti
and engineering
– Mission support (modeling and simulation,
Innovate collaboration, proposal development, and
more); outreach; education; and training

Motivate

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 18

 KM Creating an IDM Program
Collaborate Š The Information and Data Management Program creates a strategy to
create consistency, reliance, and trust in data, and enables
information sharing and reuse
Š Goal: describe a practical strategy for organizing information and
Communicate data assets for discovery and reuse (by machines and humans)
– Develop and deploy new classes of applications that merge data,
services,
i andd resources into
i a semantically
i ll aware, adaptive
d i environment
i
within a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
Innovate
– Cohesive knowledge development between NASA and partners and
robotic explorers
– Develop agents that can learn, anticipate needs, discover relevant data,
and enter into transactions on behalf of their human users
– Systems model experts’
experts patterns and behaviors to gather knowledge
Motivate implicitly
– Knowledge systems collaborate with experts for new research concepts

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 19

 KM IDM Program Planning
Collaborate
Š To create the Information and Data Management (IDM) services,
processes, and support, three critical items are needed
– Data services
• Data management standards (model registries
registries, controlled vocabularies,
vocabularies data
reference models, metadata services)
Communicate • Data source catalog for sources and query for other decisions
• Agreement and MOU repository
– Information
I f i services
i
• Discovery services (search, query, and interchange--mashup and SOA)
• Access services (inclusive of e-Authentication working with Security,
Innovate Export Control, and other key stakeholders)
• Interchange services
– Knowledge management
• Architecture for capturing, organizing, storing, and sharing knowledge
• Mission support,
support internal collaboration,
collaboration and public engagement
Motivate • Integrated search (build a common search utility that obviates the need for
local instances)--strategy and business case
• Search utility (build a common search utility that obviates the need for local
instances throughout NASA)

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 20

 KM Looking Ahead
Collaborate Š 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
Communicate – Accelerating learning
• Integrate approach to e-learning and support to the project managers
– Supporting
S i engineering
i i excellence
ll
• Drive multi-generational learning with the NASA Engineering Network
• Facilitate communities of practice with NESC technical experts
Innovate
• 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
Motivate • Governing Board, Federal KM Working Group, capturing knowledge (500
members)
• Knowledge Architect for Missile Defense Agency and Air Force Space and
Missile Command

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 21

 Knowledge Management Roadmap

Modeling Expert Knowledge

• Systems model experts’ patterns
and behaviors to gather
k
knowledge
l d iimplicitly
li itl
• Seamless knowledge exchange
Capturing Knowledge with robotic explorers
• Knowledge gathered anyplace • Planetary explorers contribute to
from hand-held devices using their successor’s design from
standard formats on interplanetary experience and synthesis
Internet • Knowledge systems collaborate
• Expert systems on spacecraft with experts for new research
Integrating Distributed Knowledge analyze and upload data
• Autonomous agents operate
• Instrument design is semi-automatic across existing sensor and
based on knowledge repositories telemetry products Enables real-time capture of tacit
Sharing Knowledge • Mission software auto-instantiates knowledge from experts on
• Adaptive knowledge infrastructure • Industry and academia supply
based on unique mission parameters spacecraft parts based on Earth and in permanent
is in place • KM pprincipals
p are p
part of NASA culture
• Knowledge resources identified f collaborative designs derived from outposts
and supported by layered COTS NASA’s knowledge system
and shared appropriately products
• Timely knowledge gets to the right • Remote data management allows • Interstellar missions
person to make decisions spacecraft to self-command Enables capture of knowledge at the • Permanent lunar and
• Intelligent tools for authoring
point of origin, human or robotic, Martian colonies
through archiving
• Cohesive knowledge development without invasive technology
Enables seamless integration
g of
b t
between NASA,
NASA itits partners,
t and
d
customers systems throughout the world • Mars robotic outposts
and with robotic spacecraft • Constellation Program
• Terrestrial Planet Finder
Enables sharing of essential
knowledge to complete • Kepler (galactic survey)
Agency tasks • JASON (oceanography)
• International Space
p Station • Phoenix to Mars
• MarsNet • Constellation Program
• Mars Exploration Rovers
• Space Interferometry Mission

2003 2007 2010 2025

 KM Thanks!
Collaborate Š 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
Communicate solutions at NASA
Š If you have any additional questions, contact me
– Jeanne.Holm@jpl.nasa.gov (818) 354-8282
Š More information can be found about
Innovate
– NASA
NASA’ss KM program: http://km.nasa.gov
http://km nasa gov
– NASA’s portal: http://www.nasa.gov

Motivate

July 11, 2008 NASA KM Team 23