Exploring the universe

On 31 January 2003, the Nasa portal quietly debuted as the world slept. Ten hours later 75 million
people turned to www.nasa.gov to understand what had happened to the Space Shuttle Columbia and her
crew. Jeanne Holm outlines how the agency applied its knowledge-management practices to overcome
the challenge of sharing knowledge during and after the crisis.
KM on the front lines
For the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), the internet is how most people find out
what is happening at the space agency. In an effort to revitalise and unite Nasas four million publicfacing web pages, and focus on inspiring and informing the public, Nasa recently revamped its websites.
Moving from a distributed network of very different sites towards an integrated online communication
channel, a new portal was deployed that integrated a content-management solution, search technologies,
dynamic portals, interactive multimedia, and an anytime, anywhere, anyone publishing model that
enabled knowledge sharing between all Nasa employees.
The goal was simple: engage the public, share Nasas knowledge with the world and inspire the next
generation of explorers as only Nasa can. The results were dramatic and delivered a dynamic, engaging
view of the US space agency and its far-reaching work supported by distributed teams throughout the
global aerospace community.
The portal, launched on 1 February 2003, was expected to receive around 142,000 hits per day. Within
hours of deployment, the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy occurred and the portal handled 75 million hits
on the first day, and over 500 million visits in the first month. The team dynamically changed the design,
information architecture and publishing capabilities to meet this unexpected need. Over the following
months, the Nasa portal has provided nearly 2 billion pieces of information, including the live launch of
two spacecraft to Mars, ongoing information about the Columbia accident investigation and the memorial
service for our fallen heroes, and updates on hurricanes.
Setting the stage for KM
In addition to capturing and sharing knowledge for a specific project or for future projects, Nasa has a
duty to share its findings and knowledge with the world at large. The latest in a series of offerings from
Nasas knowledge-management team, the portal facilitates knowledge sharing between the Nasa team and
the public.
Each activity of the KM team focuses on a specific concern facing our missions or researchers and
partners with other organisations to deliver a capability that helps solve that problem. In the case of the
Nasa portal, the KM team, sponsored by the chief information officer, delivers the infrastructure and
processes to support the content and user-focused vision of the public-affairs organisation.
In 1998, Nasas Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) looked at how knowledge-management practices might
help manage the high levels of information employees needed and created when conducting space
research and sending spacecraft to other planets. After benchmarking with many companies and
performing a meta-analysis of 45 case studies, JPL moved ahead with a system-engineering approach to
KM. This benchmarking led to a clear understanding of the factors necessary for KM to succeed. These
critical success factors are still true today and form the core of Nasas KM efforts:

Culture First and foremost, the culture must encourage knowledge sharing across organisational
boundaries and reward people for doing so;
Knowledge architecture There must be a planned, strategic approach to how and why certain
activities are chosen;

Information technology infrastructure A robust infrastructure must be available (either built

internally or outsourced) for sharing electronic information;

Supporting services People (not just systems) need to be available to help others understand
how and when to use KM processes and applications.

The main issues that drove Nasa to look at KM as a serious solution to emerging problems focused on
two things: people and safety. The Nasa workforce is ageing in some areas, more than 50 per cent of our
workforce is eligible for retirement. Coupling a mandate to downsize the government workforce in the
1990s with a scarcity of experts and an expanding number of projects has led to a fragile situation. With
the specialised knowledge Nasa often needs, it is difficult to replace peoples expertise as they walk out
the door. The concern over nurturing this essential workforce is compounded by the complexity of the
missions we undertake and the need to capture and share lessons learnt to fly safer missions.
When an agency-wide team was formed in January 2000 to address these concerns, Nasas chief
information officer at that time, Lee Holcomb, issued a broad call for team membership. Bringing
together cultural anthropologists, technologists, librarians and scientists, the Nasa knowledgemanagement team was formed. In the last year, we expanded the sponsorship of our activities to include
both human resources and engineering, which provide the people, process and technology leadership
necessary to make KM initiatives succeed.
The strategic plan and goals
The first task the team faced was to ensure we had representation from all key areas within the
organisation and then set forth a strategic plan that aligned the main strategies, drivers and initiatives
throughout Nasa. The plan focuses on:

Sustaining Nasas knowledge across missions and generations, and identifying and capturing the
information that exists across Nasa;
Helping people find, organise and share the knowledge we already have by efficiently managing
knowledge resources;
Increasing collaboration and facilitating knowledge creation and sharing by developing
techniques and tools to enable teams and communities to collaborate across the barriers of time
and space.

Turning goals into reality

The place where most KM efforts face difficulties is in trying to translate their goals and strategies into
operational reality. The best plans often fail because goals are too far-reaching or unrelated to the core
business of the organisation. At other times, failures in KM occur because systems or applications are
deployed but not provided as an end-to-end operational service. In the case of Nasa, the knowledgemanagement team has focused its efforts on proving the operational viability of bridging the most critical
knowledge gaps (more on the activities of the team can be found at http://km.nasa.gov).

Since our strategy looked at people, process and technology as a framework for success, we decided to
work first on the people issues. We attacked the problems of finding experts, capturing lessons learnt and
storytelling. Initiatives in these areas included the Know Who system that lists experts, their expertise and
their availability to work on or support projects. A re-design of the lessons-learnt information system
(http://llis.nasa.gov) included an increase from 200 to 2,300 lessons captured, and a subscription service
that allows lessons to be delivered directly to an engineer via e-mail or their personalised portal. Two
notable efforts in storytelling are focused first on sharing key lessons by active project managers through
the Academy of Program and Project Leadership (http://appl.nasa.gov) and through informal and
inspirational stories that communicate culture and historical context through the JPL library
(http://beacon.jpl.nasa.gov). A study of our recognition and awards process led to us including
knowledge-sharing language into individual and team awards.
As we moved forward, we worked towards integrating our distributed teams and resources. The
deployment of the Nasa portal and a companion portal, Inside Nasa, are bringing together distributed
publishing processes, knowledge-generation activities, and web-based resources. Inside Nasa focuses on
resources employees need for making quicker decisions and conducting day-to-day business. With
integrated e-mail access and secure instant messaging, Inside Nasa is the place to go to connect with the
Nasa workforce. Collaborative environments provide global teams with a shared space for both
synchronous and asynchronous sharing. As a team moves from an initial design concept through to the
construction of the final hardware that will land on another planet, all their information and collective
knowledge is gathered and captured. Integration with the policies and work of other groups (such as
archivists and historians) allows us to ensure that once records are captured, they are managed and made
available to other teams and researchers, now and in the future.
In the future, we will be focusing on employing technologies to enhance our ability to mine the data
within Nasas petabytes of content, promote e-learning and virtual collaboration, and enhance the ability
to automate decision making.
As a case study of how these services are delivered, the Nasa portal provides an excellent example.
Architecting for success, managing through disaster
Citizens interact with Nasa in many ways, but we reach the highest number of people through the web.
This is essential to understanding how the portal contributes to the success of our missions. People come
to Nasa to get timely, accurate and accessible information to make decisions about how to treat the
environment, to grasp the significance of investments in Americas research and development for our
long-term economic growth, and to understand our place in the universe. They also come to be
entertained, engaged and excited about space exploration, and to be a part of, if only virtually, the greatest
endeavours our world can envision. Sharing this knowledge and this excitement with the public is
essential to make Nasas missions a success.
The Nasa portal is the public-facing view of the agency over the web. With over 100,000 items published
in its first six months, the portal is the primary mechanism for Nasa to provide up-to-the-minute
information to the public. Its all there, ranging from images from the surface of Mars to updates on
returning the Space Shuttle to flight. The portals interface focuses first and foremost on the people who
care about the exploration of Earth and space: kids, students, educators, media, the public, scientists and
researchers. Behind the scenes, nearly 100,000 stories, images and documents provide a breadth of
knowledge for people to learn about, understand and dream of exploring the heavens above and the Earth
around us.

There is no better example of how the public and Nasa interact than the aftermath of the Space Shuttle
Columbia disaster. In the first 48 hours after the portal came online, citizens requested and received 220
million pieces of information. What visitors needed most was authoritative information about what had
happened to the seven astronauts. The media came to the site in droves and found structured, breaking
news and background material for their use. Teachers and students visited to understand what had
happened and to discuss it in class. Applicants to the Educator Astronaut programme were responding to
let us know that they still wanted to fly and be part of the nations space programme. The portal supported
all these efforts without a glitch, enabling the missions to focus on dealing with the issues at hand and
communicating with the public.
The portals infrastructure includes a content-management system, search engine and spider,
customisation capability, and separation of content from presentation through easily updated templates.
Hosting is outsourced to alleviate the peak traffic from Nasas internal networks and to utilise good
practices. Workflow in the publishing processes allows individualised support for each area. Governed by
an editorial board led by the Public Affairs organisation, the portal integrates the message with the media.
Since the portal was created using rapid-application-development (RAD) methods (just four weeks from
concept approval to launch), the initial requirements were met quickly with our key partners. Using these
same methods, the portal team continues to deliver iterative functionality (personalisation, enhanced
navigation and deeper content) to meet emerging requirements from the public and Nasa. Because of this,
the portal and its infrastructure remain fresh and we expect to be able to sustain it effectively and
efficiently in an ever-changing environment.
Now that the portal infrastructure is in place, Nasa has a sustainable, expandable framework through
which it can reach the public. Supported by a federated publishing process that allows anyone in the
agency to create content, the portal will integrate content or connect to all of Nasa's distinct public sites.
As the more straightforward activities have been completed, our KM efforts have focused on integrating
KM practices into the project and mission lifecycle (the design to deployment to operation concept that
all missions follow at Nasa). For example, at the inception stage, managers must review the Lessons
Learnt Information System to understand applicable lessons that will help deliver a successful project.
Use of the Technical Questions Database at key review points assures that the accumulated wisdom of
Nasas specialists is brought to bear through asking clear and pointed questions, even if that person is not
present at the review. And, throughout the lifecycle, mentoring and training is made available through the
use of just-in-time team support, recruitment of recently retired experts and team-based support.
A sustainable solution
In each of the services managed by members of the KM team, the ability to transfer our methodology and
approach, down to the technical architecture, is one of the cornerstones of our plan. Use of open
standards, commercially available solutions and an open architecture has ensured this. Systematically, we
gather requirements from our customers (citizens and Nasa employees and partners) and benchmark with
other organisations before designing the systems and services we offer. Specifically, we take a KM-based
approach to ensure that good practices in knowledge management, the technology marketplace and
communications are adapted. As we develop such systems, we keep in close contact with many other
government agencies, industry and world leaders in the field to share lessons learnt.
As the latest example of this, the Nasa portal delivers a sustainable solution for an engaging
communication vehicle with the public. Designed with good practices in mind, built at speed to citizen
requirements and using leading market solutions, the Nasa portal stood up to the ultimate test in its first

hours of deployment providing key information to the world and critical support to Nasas mission in a
moment of crisis. The existing framework allows for expansion to cover our broad range of web content
and programmes, making the portal a sustainable solution, flexible enough to cover changing missions
and handle graphic re-designs without having to overhaul the entire site.
Most importantly, the portal makes information easy to find and presents it in an engaging, multimediarich environment that draws people back. This makes the portal a key element in Nasa's mission to inspire
the next generation of explorers as only Nasa can.
Jeanne Holm leads Nasas knowledge-management team and is chief knowledge architect at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. She can be contacted at
jeanne.holm@jpl.nasa.gov