# Presentation: 095805

## Knowledge is all in the mind

- Stew Sutton and Russ AbbottThe Aerospace Corporation

- NASA JSC: Knowledge Management Conference Mar 2-3 2006

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation
- All Rights Reserved

## Where is organizational knowledge at The Aerospace Corporation?

- In the continuum between published findings and delivering results where is knowledge?
- Few characterize printed reports as knowledge.
- They consider the act of delivery by the individual or group in support of customer needs the corporate knowledge process.
- Knowledge lies in the minds and process of technical and management staff.

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## Staff Professional Experience (Oct 2005)

- Years of Experience

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## It is the person with the job to do
who must become knowledgeable
who must find and learn what’s needed.

- It is _*the person with the job to do*_
- who must become knowledgeable
- who must find and learn what’s needed.

- KM succeeds to the extent that it helps _*individual employees*_ find and learn what they need to know to do their jobs.

- Continuity to our customers.
- Continuity relies on knowledge that lasts beyond what any individual employee has in his or her head.

- Knowledge is available and accessible as a corporate asset — not just as an individual asset.

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## Organizational collaboration is the factory for developing knowledge

- Structuring collaboration around key technical processes

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## Aerospace Communities facilitate knowledge stewardship from anywhere to anywhere

**Formal****Management ****Structure**
**Vertically-Integrated**
**Departments**
**(increasingly****distributed)**

**HORIZONTAL**
**Connection & Collaboration****The “Hidden Network” that****produces corporate output**

**Cross-Organizational****Community Model**

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

**Notes:**
The role of communities is critical within the Knowledge Management Corporate Strategic Initiative.
Communities provide the core foundation for broad cross-organizational sharing of information and they are a complement to the vertically integrated management structure.
The community model is also a key element of stability as the vertical management structure of ETG is restructured to accommodate “from anywhere to anywhere” delivery.  
At the present time, ETG has restructured three of its five divisions in such a way that the General Managers of those divisions can reside in any of the three offices (El Segundo, Colorado Springs, and Chantilly).  This provides a hint of the future.  What we must now accommodate is the evolution of this restructuring as it moves down the formal structure.  The future state is that any MTS can operate out of any Aerospace facility as part of a geographically distributed department or section.
The stability that communities provide is in the organizational stewardship of knowledge.  They are a place to go to confer on common technical topics and resolve technical issues.  They store and organize the technical products of their members and they operate independent of any specific geography and increasingly with asynchronous procedures that soften the time zone variability of individual members.
What are the incentives for cross-org work?  JO from programs can foster cross-organizational collaboration

## Cross-org Communities are leveraging the corporate document management system

- KnowledgeStewards

- IndustrialBase

- Information
- Assurance

- Lasercom

**Aerolink Document Management Repository**

- Knowledge
- Management

- Parts, Material,and Process

- EELV

***A common leadership model for each cross-organizational Community of Practice***

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

**Notes:**
Cross-organizational Communities of Practice are beginning to use Aerolink to help steward their documents and shared knowledge. To introduce consistency across the technical communities, a community governance (leadership) model is being adopted for each cross-organizational Community of Practice.
The Community Sponsor provides corporate recognition of the community
The Community Leader provides topic and broad subject matter leadership and charts the course for the community and its relationship to the corporation
The Community Facilitator assures a fair and balanced protocol is maintained in the community dialog and that the broadest manageable conversation is shared between members
The Community Topic Coordinators help to pull together people and material on a specifically defined topic within the broader conversations taking form inside the community
Community Stakeholdes are customer advocates that can represent the collective interests of a specific customer viewpoint
Community Content Managers are responsible for the arrangement of documents, and other content maintained by the community
The Community Information Policy Manager assures that the marking, labeling, and distribution of content follows organizational practices and procedures and that access permissions are properly assigned to folders where content is managed
Community Members actively participates in the dialog of the community and assist in furthering the position of the community

## Aerospace Communities of Practice frame cross-org collaboration in four stages

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

**Notes:**
	Cross-organizational Communities of Practice can provide a common structure in the formulation of technical opinions.  This structure allows the multiple opinions of all roles within a community to be integrated into the formulation of position.  
	Collaboration in the phases of coordination, discussion, refinement, and publishing must accommodate sensible guidelines for collaboration:
Clear outcomes are negotiated on the outset
Priorities can be established early
Resources to topic can be reported and managed by priority
Tasks that are directed toward outcomes can be prioritized
Multi-participant discussions are formally facilitated to aggregate opinion
Refinement of position engages the stakeholders
Publishing of position engages the sponsor and organizational management

## Approaches to finding and sharing knowledge differ greatly...

- The wisdom and experience of how to approach a business topic is the most valuable knowledge.
- Most business knowledge is tribal and exists in our minds.
- This is generally shared through person-to-person interaction.

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## Motivation for sharing?

- How am I rewarded (or at a minimum just recognized) by the organization for sharing my knowledge with others?
- Knowledge is power and I choose to retain that power and my value by not sharing.
- Sharing knowledge increases my power since I am recognized for connecting people to the best information in support of their effort.

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## Corporate culture

- It’s not what you know, it’s who you know (or who knows you).
- Too much emphasis on individual awards sends a message contrary to the foundation of knowledge sharing
- Preservation of commons, no one owns it (it is implicit), but we all need to recognize it.
- Not clear how to pay for (charge back) for sharing knowledge.

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## KM Process

- KM is all about the “people” that you can count on to give you the right results.
- Changing behaviors in favor of community usage is tricky when the default is to go to the individual that your trust?
- How can we move from the social network of trusted star athletes to a community-based network where the community is the star?

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## Training must address the change

- We need access to just-in-time training for document management – this is “new” stuff to most.
- Training must address working together in collaboration across our broad geography
- Learning outcomes and skills for communities should be structured within a formal training course

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## We must attend to mentorship

- A lot of staff does not even know how to describe how they know what they know –
- There has to be a continuous process to “draw out” the process, procedure, and experience of staff.

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## Some final thoughts

- Real knowledge exists largely as the tribal wisdom of the collective organizational staff.
- In a highly technical environment where heroics by star athletes is recognized above cross-organizational group performance, mentorship and group knowledge transfer can be devalued
- The lagging efficiency of knowledge transfer is troubling when we note resources needed for mentorship are oversubscribed for delivery.

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved

## Contact for additional follow-up

- Stew Sutton
- _[stew.sutton@aero.org](mailto:stew.sutton@aero.org)_
- (310) 336-0739

- Russ Abbott
- _[russ.abbott@aero.org](mailto:russ.abbott@aero.org)_
- (310) 336-1398

- All trademarks, service marks, and trade names are the property of their respective owners.

- © 2006 The Aerospace Corporation All Rights Reserved