NASA's Shuttle Processing Takes First Steps for Total Knowledge Management

Snapshot

Organization NASA's Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Processing Directorate.

The Challenge Effectively manage contractor performance for refurbishing space shuttle orbiter.

The Strategy As part of a total knowledge management vision, take an incremental approach to provide engineers and managers with real-time Web access to reports on engineering requirements and then update and integrate electronic log, surveillance plan, and surveillance log systems.

The Results Web-based reporting solution delivers reports in 15 seconds or less, integrates data from seven databases and five operating systems, keeps engineers and managers on the same virtual page, and builds foundation for future expansion.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, Maintain, Managed Reporting, iWay ETL Manager, Information Builders Consulting.

The final seconds of the countdown for a space shuttle mission are a tense time for everyone involved, from the astronauts who pilot the vehicle to the crews who prepare the complex orbiter for flight. "Readying a reusable spacecraft for launch poses a daunting set of problems," explains Ron Phelps, a project manager and former shuttle test director at Kennedy Space Center. Before each flight, all of the systems and components must be checked, tested, adjusted, and if necessary, repaired or replaced.

The orbiter's vehicle systems and facility launch systems undergo careful scrutiny. This complicated process is the job of the Shuttle Processing Directorate at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where Phelps and other NASA managers and engineers oversee a small army of contractor personnel who painstakingly prepare the shuttle for a safe and successful mission.

To help manage the refurbishment process, the Shuttle Processing Directorate has developed the Insight System, a Web-driven reporting solution that uses Information Builders' software to monitor contractor performance and report on the status of the launch preparation effort. The system is key to NASA's vision for a total knowledge management system in which contractors and engineers share information across systems, platforms, and organizational barriers.

"Knowledge management," explains Phelps, "is getting the right information to the right people at the right time, which helps people create knowledge. Then they can share and act upon information in ways that will measurably improve the performance of NASA and its partners."

A New Way to Launch

NASA developed Insight as part of a major shift in the way it does business, necessitated by cost-cutting measures and staff cuts. "Previously, NASA engineers worked next to the contractors, so we knew that everything was being done according to spec," says Phelps. "When we reduced staffing levels and went to performance-based contracts, we needed a way to ensure that all of the preflight checks were being done correctly."

NASA described it for the engineers as "Yesterday we shared the work; tomorrow we must share the information."

With Insight, NASA shifted from direct oversight of contractors to information sharing and reporting that gives NASA engineers insight into activities that encompass more than 150,000 discrete operations and 3,700 work instruction packages.

The technological challenges, while complex, have been more manageable than the cultural ones. Engineers, who were used to providing physical oversight and working with print reports from systems they owned, were now being asked to verify that a shuttle was ready to launch based on information shared electronically from different systems, many of which they didn't own. Contractors were being asked to share the data in their systems, which raised concerns of security and how the data was going to be used.

NASA understood that a knowledge management system, in order to be successful, required the full cooperation of every person involved. "We had to show them two things," says Phelps. "One, the data providers still own and control the data through their normal security. Two, the data was not going to be used against them, but to ensure the validity of the whole process."

High Requirements for Collaboration With Contractors

NASA wanted to meet the challenge with commercial off-the-shelf hardware and software.

The solution had to connect to a variety of database types on different operating systems and provide data in a variety of formats. Infrastructures at NASA and its contractors vary widely, including five platforms, ranging from IBM VM and MVS mainframes to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), HP UNIX, and Microsoft NT servers. The data resides in seven different Oracle, Structured Query Language (SQL), and Microsoft Access databases. Systems range from proprietary to PeopleSoft implementations.

To handle this technologically complex environment, Insight had to "convert data from multiple existing databases into reports optimized for various NASA requirements," explains Phelps. "NASA does not own much of the data, so the system also had to let the data owners be comfortable with providing access. We also wanted a system that could mix and match data to produce a variety of business intelligence reports, while allowing the data providers to use tools they were comfortable with. And the system had to be able to grow as customer requirements increase." Phelps also wanted to deliver reports in 15 seconds or less.

Integration, Reporting, and Update Capabilities

"Information Builders had the suite of integration products and could accomplish everything we wanted, and had good capabilities at a reasonable cost," says Phelps.

iWay Software, an Information Builders subsidiary specializing in business integration, accesses and integrates the data from the diverse systems. iWay ETL Manager extracts, transforms, and loads the data into SQL.

Information Builders' Web-based business intelligence software, WebFOCUS, reports on the data and delivers it in the formats the data owners and users want via the Web. WebFOCUS Managed Reporting provides a friendly interface that allows users to go into the system with tools they know already – while also preserving the security of the data owners' systems and adding more security on the NASA side. Users can point-and-click in a self-service Web environment for running standard reports, drill down into the data, build their own ad hoc reports, download data directly into Excel for further analysis, and publish information in HTML or PDF.

Maintain, part of the WebFOCUS suite, closes the loop, enabling the system to collect new data by providing users with Web-based forms for updating information in a newly integrated electronic log, surveillance plan, and surveillance log system.

Information Builders Consulting helped the NASA programmers build Insight, including the electronic log system, throughout its phased development. "We wanted to make the consultants part of the team, so they could not only supply product knowledge but learn how we do business," says Phelps. "We needed consultants who could come in and stay with the project and get us all the way through. Information Builders worked with us to make that happen. They've been more than willing to do what needs to be done to make us successful."

A Giant Leap, One Step at a Time

When the Shuttle Processing Directorate first conceived of Insight, they envisioned a system that defined metrics for core processes and then measured performance against those metrics. Over time it became clear that the biggest need was for specific reports and updated systems that directly help the engineers do their jobs. The Shuttle Processing Directorate decided to take an incremental approach with immediate payoffs.

With the data integration capabilities of Insight, Phelps and the Insight team can now go after data for specific needs, for example, safety and close-call reports. By meeting the pressing needs of the 300 people who use the system now, they are building the foundation for accomplishing their ultimate vision of a total knowledge management system that many more people can use.

The next step currently under way is to update and integrate some older, but critical, applications in a Microsoft Access database: the electronic log book, the surveillance plan, and the surveillance log. Engineers use these systems to identify tasks that need to be formed on a particular vehicle during a particular flow, and then to log what has been implemented. By integrating all three systems with one another at the enterprise level, Insight will be gathering data that can be used immediately and also serve as a basis for knowledge management and future performance metrics.

The Insight team plans to implement similar applications for the operational and quality groups, growing the system to serve 400 to 500 people in the next phase.

Stellar Results

"I elected to use existing hardware and operating systems," explains Phelps, "because with Information Builders and iWay Software, I had the technology to do that. You name the database, I can get to it, I can integrate it, and post the results to the Web." For example, in one instance, Phelps was able to convert over one million records in a DB2 database into the Oracle file format he needed in less than two hours.

As a result of this kind of flexibility, Phelps did not have to ask the data owners to change anything they were already doing – a huge advantage for winning acceptance of the system. "Not only has Information Builders' technology allowed us to leverage existing hardware investments," Phelps continues, "but we can meet any reporting requirement immediately."

For example, many people at NASA use Excel, but cutting and pasting data into Excel and distributing the information has been very time-consuming. One user, in fact, usually spent two weeks preparing a report. Now, he can prepare and publish his report in 15 minutes. "WebFOCUS allowed me to do that. All they needed was Excel and a browser, no plug-ins or any other client-side software," says Phelps.

Phelps concludes, "One of the engineers was building a report on his desktop from the database, when his supervisor walked by and said, 'That's great – when can I have access to that?' The engineer called me to get the report moved to the Web for his boss. When you start getting those types of calls, you know you've been successful."