Aggressively Pursuing Knowledge Management Over Two Years: A Case Study at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Throughout the U.S. government, the federal civil servant population is facing a human capital crisis as over half the workforce will be eligible to retire in the next few years. As a result of this ensuing dilemma, the President's Management Agenda highlights the "Strategic Management of Human Capital" as one of the top five government-wide initiatives.

Knowledge management (KM) should be one of the pillars in a human capital strategy. Government agencies need to further embrace knowledge management, and aggressively build it into their mission. A suggested two-year plan for incorporating knowledge management into the organization is:

First Year

• Create an awareness of KM at all levels in the organization
• Educate people on knowledge management
• Initiate quick-win, KM pilots with metrics for success (peppered throughout the organization)
• Develop the technology infrastructure to support knowledge sharing
• Incorporate KM into the organization's human capital strategy

Second Year

• Develop the organizational infrastructure to support knowledge management (e.g., Knowledge Stewards, Knowledge Retention Managers, etc.)
• Embed KM processes into the daily working activities of the employees (e.g., capture and share lessons learned during each phase of the project life cycle)
• Develop a recognition and reward system to promote knowledge sharing behaviors
• Expand the KM pilots into full-fledge KM projects

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), one of the ten NASA Centers, currently following this plan during its first year of its formalized knowledge management journey. About one-third of the Goddard civil servants will be eligible to retire in the next five years. To look ahead, a Human Capital Strategy Working Group, along with a Knowledge Management Working Group, have been formed to address the challenges of capturing, sharing, and applying knowledge internally and externally, and developing the human capital strategy for the GSFC workforce of the future. Success will ultimately be measured in terms of innovation, people retention, knowledge retention, productivity, and mission success.

As we complete our first year of our formal knowledge management program, the following knowledge management activities have been used at GSFC:

(1) an innovative best practices/lessons learned CD based on the MAP satellite project has been developed (and copies circulated throughout GSFC) in cooperation with NASA's Academy for Program and Project Leadership (APPL);

(2) four narrative case studies on GSFC successful and unsuccessful missions are being written and then integrated into the APPL project management training courses;

(3) a knowledge preservation pilot project has been launched to capture video nuggets of important stories from GSFC personnel in the program/project management and systems engineering areas via online web-searchable video;

(4) the NASA Lessons Learned Information System (LLIS) (http://llis.nasa.gov) has been enhanced to include a "push" capability to send appropriate lessons learned to individuals via user profiles, and a visual prototype of the Next Generation LLIS has been developed;

(5) learning and knowledge sharing proficiencies are being explored through a NASA Headquarters study on Recognition and Rewards, as well as proposing a new award at GSFC for "Significant Learning and Knowledge Sharing";

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