Sharing Our Innovations

A lot of thought and discussion has occurred lately concerning how to improve our internal communications in NASA. Here at JSC, this discussion has culminated with the release of the 20 Year Vision proposal. I am both honored and fortunate to have met with some of the people who made it happen and look forward to working with them on the implementation of those ideas.

With that in mind, I think that some of my professional experiences elsewhere can be brought to bear on this topic. In between undergrad and grad school, I worked in the intelligence community (IC) for a few years as a missile analyst. If you think the NASA community is results-oriented, the IC takes it to a whole new level.

Fortunately, we had the advantage of a very collegiate environment within the analysis side of the house. When I became free of performance review concerns because of my decision to accept a full scholarship from Rice for graduate school, my management asked me to write candidly about my experiences as a young analyst and offer my suggestions for how we could be doing it better.

The IC faces much the same difficulty in retaining institutional knowledge as NASA does, largely thanks to hiring freezes in previous years and frequent postings to out-of-office rotations. For obvious reasons, I can’t discuss some of the specific operational and training-related issues we looked at, but I can talk about how we considered using open source tools for team and idea management.

We didn’t really think about it in terms of being a generational issue, actually. Instead, it was more of a discussion of how we could leverage today’s technology to help do our jobs better. We looked at how to make our organization more “flat” and “open” internally, without necessarily using those words. We recognized that the details and the process are just as important at the working level as the published product that goes to the policymaker and that we needed a way to store that information in an easily accessible manner.

The idea of team-oriented Wikis for improving access and information exchange both within and between analytical teams was already gaining steam. I recommended we take that a step further and also have individual blog capabilities so that analysts could better keep track of both their analytical process and project milestones.

This would help with compiling progress reports and allow a newcomer to an account get up to speed relatively quickly. The stipulation that the blogs be free of consideration in performance reviews, to encourage brainstorming and the freedom to learn by working through mistakes, was added to protect analysts’ concerns.

I think we could do something much like this here at NASA to improve accessibility between teams and working groups by encouraging more of a dialogue. Such a system would also be ideal for helping our outreach and public affairs people identify the technologies and ideas (and the people behind them) that ought to get wider distribution.

I’m not the only person who thinks so, much to my delight. The recently-released 20 Year Vision proposes precisely what I am suggesting, in the form of the Virtual Collaboration Center – a combined operations mapping tool and secure collaboration environment for the internal JSC community.

In my current job as a systems engineer for the Constellation Training Facility, I have sought out the teams that are developing the hardware systems I am writing modeling requirements for. The e-mail trail is pretty extensive at this point and I’ve worked very hard to write our simulation requirements to describe the training needs they anticipate.

Much to my amazement, my efforts in this regard have come as something of a surprise to those teams. One group in particular noted to me that their buy-in had never really been asked for before. I think of the Virtual Collaboration Center as exactly the kind of solution we need to help make such collaboration a more institutional practice.

Through the Virtual Collaboration Center, I could keep track of my counterparts’ work progress, communicate collaboratively with those teams, have easily accessible records of those interactive conversations, and get notices when their formal documentation is ready for prime time. Such a system would enable me to develop in parallel, instead of reactively, and better ensure that simulation models will accurately reflect the actual hardware.

My working group could also use the Virtual Collaboration Center for internal communication and project coordination by virtue of keeping track of our thoughts and process in a central, stable area. As individuals move on in their careers, their institutional knowledge would be accessible even when they physically are not.

With a central project collaboration environment available to our working community, I think we’ll go a long way in improving both inter- and intra-organizational connectivity in a manner that preserves the history of how and why we made the decisions we did.