Phased Approach to a Knowledge Management Network

Damiano Guerrucci

, Roberta Mugelessi Dow

, Raúl Cano Argamasilla

and Diogo Bernardino

European Space Agency, Frascati, Italy

European Space Agency, Darmstadt, Germany

Terma GmbH, Darmstadt, Germany

Serco Services GmbH, Darmstadt, Germany

Keywords: ESA, Use Case, ATV, Knowledge Management.

Abstract: An information-based organisation has a number of repositories to store information of different nature used

by different teams and not necessarily interconnected. This leads to a situation in which the information is

scattered, duplicated and difficult to access. The ESA KM Team aims to produce an interconnected network

of local knowledge units (neurons) which could still produce and store their knowledge using local

processes, and at the same time sharing it with the whole network. This paper describes a phased approach

to deploy such a solution, which starts by achieving quick wins that bring big benefits at extremely low cost,

in view of buying support for the next more demanding phases. Moreover, it is presented an use case in

which the approach has been applied, drawing some lessons learned and conclusions from it.

1 INTRODUCTION

The recurring situation in which different

departments of the same organisation have different

systems and processes to store their information is

one of the main challenges to be solved by any

Knowledge Management team. The main

disadvantages are incompatibility, inefficient and

limited access , duplications.

The ESA Knowledge Management team has

been dealing with this situation since many years

already and even though representatives of different

projects or areas agree that a common entry point to

ESA knowledge is necessary, the trend is to stick to

the usual habits within the team, working over local

solutions that are not necessarily integrated into a

corporate view.

2 BACKGROUND

In the last decade, the ESA Knowledge Management

team has worked on a number of pilot projects that

offered different opportunity at identifying and put

in place solutions.

One of the main activities in the past was the

“KM user days”, in which the knowledge

management team was in direct contact with the user

community from diverse units in order to gather an

eclectic set of knowledge related proposals aiming at

improving the capturing and sharing of knowledge.

The proposal which came as the most urgent, was

the creation of a single entry point from where any

ESA employee could reach relevant knowledge. The

requested knowledge includes: mission

documentation, lessons learned, informal content

shared by team members, videos from interviews,

pictures, lectures and any other types of content that

the user would consider interesting either for reuse

or simply for corporate culture.

This lead to the development of the ESA

Knowledge Management portal, which scope was to

gather the mentioned information plus adding a

classification on top of the contents and offering a

set of services such as calendar or meeting

scheduling.

After several years, the same tool went through a

number of reviews and further modification

according to user requirements and expectations,

however still not encountering the expected

engagement from the user community. One of the

main reasons for this limited success, is perceived

due to the existing knowledge that users have stored

in other system and the acceptable resistance in

migrating data for a not clear benefit. Also, teams

that might have been more active in using the new

101

Guerrucci D., Mugellesi Dow R., Cano Argamasilla R. and Bernardino D..

Phased Approach to a Knowledge Management Network.

DOI: 10.5220/0005014101010108

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2014), pages 101-108

ISBN: 978-989-758-050-5

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

 Knowledge Capture

List of videos from lectures and workshops at

ESA, some of which are transcribed and

searchable with text input

 Events

List of the dates and places of relevant events

 Lessons Learned

General information about the Lessons Learned

systems at ESA

 Expertise Directory

A catalogue of experts searchable by a their

competencies

 Knowledge Portfolio

Taxonomy from where the user can reach all the

knowledge stored in the relevant element in the

tree

 Tools Catalogue

A list of tools spread around ESA and editable

by the very same users

 KM Organization in ESA

General information about the organization of

KM at ESA

 KM Digital Library

A set of digital books extracted from the content

within the KM portal

 Communities

User driven sections, where they can add public

or private contents and discuss about them with

the members.

Figure 1: Main services offered by the KM Portal.

tool, would have been demotivated by the fact that

the user community (and therefore the sharing of

information) was not increasing as expected.

In view of the above results, the approach has

been modified; one side, keep an appealing place for

the user, where relevant content can be stored, and

on the other side, introducing a search capability for

finding information traditionally stored in other

systems within the organisation.

3 KM VISION

Each project or mission at ESA can be considered an

entity producing, storing and accessing their own

information, however with the continuous need of

accessing the information of each other. Each

project would use their own repositories and

document management systems. In some cases, the

same official platforms is either extended or tailored

to a specific mission or project. At the same time,

cross fertilization or sharing across projects is

achieved by allowing temporary access to each other

repository or exchanging documentation.

For KM, the analogy of a “neuron” will serve us

appropriately, being a “neuron” an organizational

unit or project team that wants to preserve in a more

or less standardized way their knowledge, while

being able to access the one coming from other

neurons.

In this sense, a vision could be to build the “ESA

brain” as a network of interconnected neurons where

the user could navigate through all ESA knowledge.

4 KM IMPLEMENTATION:

PHASED APPROACH

The best balance in cost and obtained results is

achieved by a phased approach, allowing to get

some important result already during the

implementation phase.

There are some advantages to a phased approach:

1. Each neuron will keep its own “identity”,

which means, it will be tailored to the

knowledge needs of the unit.

2. Federated approach, giving to the

responsible of each neuron the option to

further customize the platform to the needs

of the team.

3. The platforms supporting each neuron can

reside wherever in the organization, as long

as the interface among them is kept.

4. Aligned with ESA culture, which is leaving

a certain level of autonomy to the unit. This

approach will give to the neuron

responsible the control over most of the

functionality and content.

The phased approach has been designed with 3

phases, starting with small and low risk activities,

however giving quick results and iterating over

pilots program until an stable final system is

reached.

Even before starting the phased approach,

particular attention must be given to identify those

missions or projects where the knowledge to be

preserved is critical, either due to its uniqueness or

to the good value for future activities. Based on this,

a number of project/missions will need to be

considered for the application of the different

phases. The main content of each phase is detailed in

Figure 2.

The following section in this paper elaborates

further on the area we identified at ESA, on which

we followed the phased approach.

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Phase 1: Quick win

Focus on get the user engagement through

easy implemented solutions. Normally the

indexing of existing repositories with the search

engine will serve that purpose.

Phase 2: KM tool suite

Build a KM platform tailored to the unit,

keeping at the same time a minimum set common

requirements to ensure clear interfaces between all

the “neurons” of the network.

Phase 3: Knowledge network

Connect all the established neurons to make

them visible from each other. This phase is

including awareness and support from

management to keep growing the knowledge

network

Figure 2: Different phases in the KM implementation.

5 PHASE 1: QUICK WIN

The typical start scenario is the existence of

repository of information, embedded in existing

process for the recording of information.

The aim of the first phase is to define a scalable

and generic solution able to connect existing

information from a single place. The adoption of a

general purpose search engine is giving a quick

solution. The most of the search engine on the

market are already customised to the indexing of

repository based on common technology and

therefore the connection of system can be achieved.

by simple customisation.

The acceptance of the user community is

facilitated by the fact that with almost no efforts

from their side, their knowledge is made available,

even without the need of changing their current way

of handling their information, since their system can

remain unchanged.

The platform embedding the search engine will

offer a single starting point to the general user able

to search within a big amount of data, normally in an

user friendly way and using effective filter

capabilities. The same platform offers to the

administrator a high ease of use to add file systems

or websites to be indexed within a few clicks.

Therefore, the main work of the KM team on this

phase would be to identify the information

repositories that are currently used by certain units

and make them accessible through the search engine.

If the implementation and the awareness of this

service is successful, it is to be expected that the

disposition of the users toward KM initiatives

change positively, so to easy the execution of the

next phases. It is important to highlight the need of

the support from the user community who will

essentially react and being proactive only if seeing

immediate benefits.

6 PHASE 2: KM TOOL SUITE

This is the most important part of the process.

Normally, if an organizational unit does not have

specific KM tool in use, the KM team can provide a

tool suite to build a knowledge base, either for

capturing a closing program or for supporting a

running one. Therefore, once we have applied a

quick win solution to the mentioned unit within the

organization and gained support from that unit’s

management team, the next step is to start the

second phase.

It is suggested to initiate this phase preparing a

formal Project Management Plan, identifying the

KM team as the service provider and the interested

unit as the customer.

The core services offered by KM have to be

defined and implemented taking into account not

only the needs of the current project but also

scalability and reusability that will enable building a

network of interconnected platforms or “neurons”.

In the first group we would include activities such

as:

 Repositories identification (for videos,

documents and other sources of

information).

 Experts identification and assessment in the

competency management (CM) tool.

 Running of interviews.

 Development of a wiki page.

In the second group, certain work that should be

common in every KM Tool Suite or “neuron” would

involve

 Creation of a knowledge map in the unit.

 Classification of the stored knowledge

within that map.

 Standardization of the content types

imported in the platform, so they are

compatible across the network of

“neurons”.

 Interfaces with the external search engine.

 Connection of the whole platform to the

network of “neurons”.

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 Project goal

Gather and preserve relevant knowledge of the

selected organizational unit

 Start and end dates

Agreed duration for the project

 Project schedule

A detailed chart with the activities, milestones

and deliverables for the project

 Activities and work packages

Work packages structure to be followed

(highly recommended)

 Deliverables

The main deliverable will be the KM Tool

Suite, but other deliverables can be considered,

such as a Proof-of-Concept

 Roles and responsibilities

Who is doing what. Eventually reflected in the

work packages definition and responsibility.

 Manpower and financial requirements

Financial and manpower commitments

Figure 3: Items included in the project plan .

Also, since the project will involve a

considerable amount of activities and systems, we

recommend to add Proof-of-Concept milestone that

can be presented to the interested team, so they

perceive the progress of the KM work and at the

same time it reduces the risk of deviations of the

expected outcome.

As a further improvement, it could be studied

how to deliver the tool suite as a service using cloud

technology.

6.1 Requirements for a Layered Design

The explained concept can be successful on the long

run only if the main functionality is as independent

as possible from the platform and software providing

it.

As an example, it shall always be possible to

replace the search engine with a different product,

might performances or functionalities being an issue,

as well as with the knowledge management portal or

competency management tools.

With this approach it is ensured an open

architecture with the possibility of integrating other

systems not foreseen now, guaranteeing that the

system stores, classifies and allow access to all the

information to be preserved, while at the same time

it is decoupled from the implementing platform.

There are certain requirements that any adopted

solution must meet:

Element Requirement

KM Portal Keep one entry per each knowledge

component to be stored, in a

standardized format, independently of

the original.

KM Portal Be connectable to the knowledge

network in a way that the entries within

it are visible from others platforms in

the network.

KM Portal Every element on the architecture shall

be either integrated in or accessible

from the KM Portal

Knowledge

components

Be enabled for classification within the

knowledge map.

Knowledge

components

Be searchable from the KM Portal.

External

engine

Index every knowledge component that

has not an entry in the KM Portal.

External

engine

Be scalable to many interconnected

instances.

External

engine

Be integrated in the KM Portal.

Figure 4: High level requirements for a layered design.

7 PHASE 3: KNOWLEDGE

NETWORK

The completion of Phase 2 delivers a “neuron”: a

platform containing the relevant knowledge of

certain organizational unit, capable of being

connected to analogous ones in other areas, enabling

the user to retrieve information both from their usual

unit and from any other external to them.

The work on the Phase 3 has the following

objectives:

1. Improve the content classification within

the “neuron’s” knowledge base.

2. Assure the correct connection among the

different “neurons” in the knowledge

network.

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3. Outreach and awareness of the developing

of the knowledge network. Liaise with

potential customers and secure the

managerial support within the organization.

The first goal is necessary to ensure that the

knowledge map in the “neuron” will be an access

point to the stored information, and this is done by

tagging each content item with one or many

categories within the map. The benefits of such an

activity are manifold: by visiting the category X

(e.g. “Operational procedures”), the user would get

all the content belonging there, be it a document, a

video, a lesson learned or even an expert on that

area. Also, the system could identify related areas

and retrieve results as well, even if they belong to

different “neurons” of the network. The only

problem with this is that the classification of the

content within the map is normally a manual

process, very time consuming and need the

involvement of the team from the unit implementing

the “neuron”. Therefore, it must be foreseen already

at the beginning of the Phase 2 that after the delivery

of the “neuron”, the recipient community should

work on the classification of the contents within the

knowledge map.

Secondly, the resulting “neuron” must be

connected to the to the knowledge network and be

visible from it. The KM team must ensure and

monitor the correct functioning of that connection

for keeping a healthy and appealing system to

current and future customers.

Finally, the last goal of Phase 3 is to get

necessary support both for adding new nodes to the

knowledge network in the organization and to

maintaining the existing ones. For that purpose, the

KM team has to focus on awareness activities,

liaising with the stakeholders and potential

customers within the organization.

8 USE CASE: ATVCAP

8.1 Introduction

The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is a mission

that has been running at ESA for more than ten years

since its conception. It is coming to an end by 2014,

leaving behind an enormous amount of knowledge

and experiences, from which several areas are of an

unique nature and they will be lost if no action is

taken to that respect.

Knowing this situation, the KM team contacted

the ATV responsible and offered a proposal for a

knowledge preservation project. The years of

experience of the KM team would be now applied to

ATV, covering the following areas:

Technologies. Adapting existing tools as the KM

Portal with search engine, wiki, competencies

management, knowledge inventories.

Processes. Applying with minimum

modifications processes as the ATV knowledge

identification, knowledge capture process,

competencies management and lessons learned

collection and dissemination.

People. Identifying the relevant experts and

including them within the Expertise Directory and

for reference into the ATV wiki.

Documents. Classifying ATV documentation

and applying metadata to ease the searching and for

reference into the wiki.

This proposal was conditionally approved,

subject to the acceptance of a Proof-of-Concept,

resulting in the kick-off of an activity spanning over

an entire year and following the phased approach

explained below.

8.2 Phase 1: Quick Win

The first steps were aimed to get the buy in of the

ATV team. Some existing functionalities were

demonstrated such as the KM Portal, the

Competency Management tool or a customised wiki

and a clear view of how a comprehensive system

could be created by a synchronized interaction of

such technology applied to the ATV mission. Of

particular importance was the demonstration of the

existing general purpose search engine, which the

KM team decided to use to crawl and index some

ATV information sources. The tool could process

out of the box, offering in this way a quick and

efficient service with real data from the mission.

The principal step was the development of a

Proof-of-Concept platform that would demonstrate

the possibilities of all the KM tools integrated and

working together. This activity was performed

during two months with the objective to produce a

pilot platform gathering a sample of all the

information to retrieve from the ATV mission and to

give a flavour of the activities that shall be run

during the whole period of ATVCAP.

8.3 Phase 2: KM Tool Suite for ATV

After the acceptance of the Proof-of-Concept, the

project called ATVCAP will continue for the rest of

the year, with this objective in mind:

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To capture, preserve and make available the

knowledge, documents, experience, processes and

procedures accumulated during the overall lifetime

of ATV project.

The ATVCAP project combines the work for the

identification, capture and storage of relevant

knowledge with the goal of making both explicit and

implicit knowledge related to ATV available for

different types of customers within ESA. To sum up,

the ultimate objective of the project is to capture and

make available ATV implicit and explicit

knowledge.

The ATVCAP Project Plan is articulated in four

main periods:

Planning. This phase consists of ATV technical

domains and knowledge areas identification,

classification and appraisal, identification of the

critical ATV knowledge areas and experts,

identification of the customers of ATVCAP,

selection of appropriate methodologies and set up

necessary KM tools and technologies;

Implementation. This phase consists of

customising and deploying the KM Tool Suite,

performing knowledge capture events, identifying

relevant knowledge, classification of the identified

elements and the rolling out of a dedicated search

engine.

Evaluation. This phase consists in putting in

place mechanisms and procedures for monitoring the

project operations and progress to ensure that

activities occur as planned, that they remain directed

towards the stated objectives, and that appropriate

corrective actions are taken if required.

Completion. This phase consists in completing

and delivering to ATV project and the other

identified customers the tools which have been

implemented, users manuals, final reports and other

supporting documentation. Final presentation at

closure of the project will also be performed.

There are several factors that are key to success:

 Being able to import into the ATV Portal all

the knowledge components that the ATV

team wants to preserve.

o To this respect, relevant items were

identified: archived documents, videos,

lessons learned, experts and software.

o For each of them, a corresponding entry

in the ATV Portal has been chosen,

together with the ability to tag each

component according to the knowledge

map.

 Involvement of the ATV team in the

population of the wiki called ATVpedia.

o The ATVpedia aims at gathering

information of the ATV mission at very

different level of detail, that will need to

be reviewed and approved by the experts

from ATV.

 Involvement of the ATV team in the

classification of contents within the ATV

Portal.

o As for the ATVpedia, also the

categorisation and tagging of the contents

must be done under the supervision of the

ATV team.



Knowledge map

ATV knowledge taxonomy.

 ATV Portal

Central entry point of the KM Tool Suite.

 ATVpedia

A wiki that captures the different aspects of the

mission not covered by other elements of the

suite.

 Expertise directory

Search professionals based on their expertise.

 Lessons learned

ATV lessons learned are categorised in the

knowledge map and accessible from the portal.

 Knowledge capture events

Recorded expert interviews for critical topics.

 Documentation

Documentation tagged within the knowledge

map.

 Software

Software tagged within the knowledge map.

Figure 5: KM Tool Suite elements for ATV.

8.3.1 ATVCAP System Architecture

The ATV team has defined along way a set of

systems to store the information in different ways

and according to the expected use within their

mission. These include the existing repositories:

 File systems.

 Websites.

 Databases.

However if the same information has to be

published outside the project, a more generic access

is needed that is not assuming an internal knowledge

of the project structure and organisation.

Another goal of ATVCAP is to harmonize the

storage of what is considered relevant for the future,

therefore, the KM team has to ensure that every

piece of knowledge that is considered valuable be

kept and classified accordingly.

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The achievement of the above goals is obtained

by adopting a number of interconnected tools that

are accessible by the end user from a single

interface: the ATV Portal.

Figure 6: Main sections of the ATV Portal

These generic tools, customized by the KM team

for the ATV project, are:

 ATV Portal.

 ATVpedia.

 Search engine.

 Competency Management tool.

It is expected that both systems (ATV existing

platforms and ATVCAP) coexist during some time

until the ATV mission is reaching the nominal end

and the ATVCAP might remain as the official

visible interface.

8.4 Phase 3: ATVCAP in a Knowledge

Network

After the ATVCAP project is completed, there is a

number of steps required to fulfil with the KM

vision:

 Prepare the ATV Portal for the connection to the

network of neuron. Since ATVCAP is the very

Figure 7: ATVCAP system architecture

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107

first of its kind, it can only be prepared to a

future connection. Therefore, the expected

activities are the test of the functionality within a

mock non-operational network in order to

guarantee the correct functioning in the future.

 Gather user feedback. The ATVCAP platform

has been prepared with enough mechanisms to

gather comments and suggestions from the user.

 Liaise with other organizational units to build

new instances of the project and grow the

knowledge network.

 Evolve the platform to be able to offer it as a

service to future customers. A great step ahead

would be the offering of the KM Tool Suite as a

service, preparing the core of the functionalities

to be installed with a minimum effort. Many

examples of this can be found today on many

web hosting companies, which deploy a variety

of pre-cooked software packages just by a few

mouse clicks.

 Create awareness within ESA. The KM team has

to advertise and promote the KM strategy within

the organization so that the approach is presented

to the user community. Initiatives like

presentations, intranet articles and user day, or ad

hoc presentation within already existing

information meetings, would help the awareness

of the ATVCAP product and the upcoming

knowledge network.

9 CONCLUSIONS

After many years, the KM team at ESA, has

identified the need to have a single entry point to all

the information within the organization. A first

attempt was the KM Portal, which did not reach the

expected visibility. The analysis performed, using

the user feedback, made clear the need of preserving

the highly autonomous culture of the Agency:

instead of offering a single portal for everyone, each

organizational unit shall be left the opportunity of

administering their own platform for knowledge,

however ensuring access to the information from a

centralised place. In this way the requirement of

having a single entry point is respected, and at the

same time, the processes already established are

preserved without impact to the individual

projects/units.

The way to build a knowledge network has to

follow a phased approach. Starting with a quick-win

solution a higher ratio of user engagement is

achieved, giving the necessary spin off to continue

with the development at a deeper scope. The second

phase of the implementation is the most critical. It is

a project in itself, a knowledge platform customized

to the unit’s needs, but at the same time, keeping

certain features to guarantee scalability, interfaces

and reusability. Finally, the last step of the

implementation includes the interconnection of the

developed knowledge platform to other similar ones

existing already, so each of them can be visible from

any node in the network. The monitoring of this

system is essential, as it is the continuous liaising

and awareness creation, which should assure the

growing of the knowledge network until it covers

the whole organization.

As an use case, the paper has described the work

performed with ATVCAP, a knowledge preservation

project for the ATV mission. It is thanks to the

success of this project that next steps might be

realised with less resistance towards the

implementation of a corporate knowledge network.

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Mugellesi Dow, R., et al., 2013, Knowing More About

Knowledge Management At ESA, KMIS 2013,

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Guerrucci, D., et al., 2012. Technological Aspects of the

KM System in ESA, 4

International Conference on

KM, Toulouse SpaceShow 2012, Toulouse.

Mugellesi Dow, R., et al., 2010. Managing Knowledge for

Spacecraft Operations at ESOC, Journal of

Knowledge Management, Vol.14, No.5.

Mugellesi Dow, R., et al., 2011. Corporate Knowledge

Management, IAC-11, D5,2,1, Cape Town, SA.

Pallaschke, S., et al., 2011. Capturing of Experience. IAC-

12, D5,2,3, Naples, IT.

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