1 Knowledge Management in Support of Spacecraft Operations

Abstract

The paper provides an overview of the status of the implementation of Knowledge Management in ESOC. Since the start, KM has been driven by the ESOC core business and focused mainly on procedures and tools to capture and share the knowledge and to preserve and evolve the competencies of the centre. Recently the ESA Corporate KM Initiative has been launched and in this context a framework of KM projects to be undertaken at different ESA sites has been drawn. The paper presents those KM projects implemented at ESOC as services offered to the community. These services are related to increasing knowledge transfer, sharing and collaboration in particular within and across projects, assessing the core competences, strengthening the lessons learned and golden rules dissemination, and reinforcing the process of tacit knowledge capture. The competence management model defined in ESOC is also presented showing the evolution from the concept of competence appraisal dedicated to single section/division to a key tool for the management. The paper concludes by presenting the way forward and an initial approach to measure the KM benefits. An important characteristic of the ESOC´s approach is to accomplish the KM goals in a way that is non-intrusive and does not force any new procedures or habits to end-users. In fact, several examples can be found in the literature where attempts of Knowledge Management forced end users to change their habits and “do things ” in a way the system could understand. This approach mostly led to failures and demonstrated that it’s hard to change habits! Th