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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:
PhasedApproachtoaKnowledgeManagementNetwork
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