Integrating Knowledge Management in ESOC

Paper number

IAC-06-D5.1.03

Author

Mrs. Roberta Mugellesi Dow, European Space Agency/ESOC, Germany

Coauthor

Mr. Siegmar Pallaschke, European Space Agency/ESOC, Germany

Coauthor

Dr. Manfred Warhaut, European Space Agency/ESOC, Germany

Year

2006

Abstract

Effective knowledge management is an important strategic issue especially for knowledge intensive organization like ESOC which are competing against decreasing budgets and increasing effectiveness requirements. The working environment in ESOC is composed of several domains where the staff have specialized tasks, knowledge and expertise. The challenge is to understand how the knowledge is articulated in the technical domains in terms of people, process, technology and content. The objective of this paper is to describe the activities initiated at ESOC in the Knowledge Management domain.

In order to get experience with the knowledge activities as well as to get an insight into the organizational culture, it was proposed to limit the scope of the project to a particular work area, the Flight Dynamics, which can be characterised as very complex and technical. Therefore, the results presented in the paper are based on this case taken as example.

In the initial phase of the study, the selected area has been analysed to identify the work organization, the process techniques and the problems/fault recovery methodology. Starting from the basic business strategy of the selected area, the questions which are tried to be answered are: who knows what, how the knowledge is shared, who creates the knowledge and where is created, what knowledge is used and by whom, why this specific knowledge is valuable to the overall organization, what is the status of our knowledge and where it should be improved. In this phase, the drivers, either internal or external, and their impact on the knowledge and the constraints are identified. This allows to identify knowledge gaps.

The five core knowledge activities are: identify, create, store, share and use the knowledge. As results of this analysis, matrices are constructed for each of the core activity showing the relevant cultural aspects for Knowledge Management and highlighting the starting point of change for each tool and method. During this initial phase, the links between the identified knowledge activities and other related areas present in ESOC are also emerging. This could also suggest possibilities of leveraging the initiatives, skills and practices. Some related areas are the human resources management, information systems, quality management and risk management. 

The second phase of the project consists of proposing a plan addressing the knowledge gaps and the activities which need to be strengthen in the organization and select the tools to be used. In this process, metrics to evaluate and measure that the knowledge processes have been implemented correctly in the selected area are also suggested. Examples of metrics are the number of experts identified, savings achievable by knowledge re-use and information maintenance.

Abstract document

IAC-06-D5.1.03.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-06-D5.1.03.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

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