Socialcast Helps Teams at NASA Communicate More Easily and Capture Tacit Knowledge

NASA, where the hard work literally is rocket science, depends on timely communication: not just between control centers and distant space craft, but also among workers distributed across NASA's ten major R&D centers. Recently the issue of inter-center communication has become especially important, as NASA undertakes its Constellation program to update the Space Shuttle. Previous NASA missions were usually developed at a single NASA center. The Constellation project, a major technical undertaking, spans centers and requires far-flung research and engineering teams to work together efficiently.

So it behooves NASA to find broadly applicable solutions for employees and contractors to exchange information—exchange it, and record it, too, for another transformation NASA is facing is the aging and retiring of its workforce. The average NASA employee is nearly 47 years old and has worked at the organization for 17 years. There's a lot of NASA history and knowledge walking around in lab coats and business casual. And many of those employees are beginning to retire. To preserve the organization's intellectual capital, NASA needs to find a convenient, unobtrusive way for employees to record and share their tacit knowledge.

These challenges were evident to a group of NASA JPL engineers who attended the KM World conference back in 2007. There they heard a talk by Tim Young, CEO of a social networking platform solution called Socialcast. Tim talked about the benefits of Socialcast, a SaaS service that enables company employees to post status messages, ask and answer questions, share documents, and so on.

The NASA engineers were intrigued and decided to launch a pilot project. Celeste Merryman, a pilot manager for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) at NASA JPL, and Douglas Hughes, a project manager at NASA JPL, ran the pilot project, which involved customizing Socialcast for the NASA environment. The new SaaS service was dubbed NASAsphere.

Now the results of that NASAsphere pilot are in, and they're quite compelling.

• NASAsphere participants invited 398 of their colleagues from around NASA, with 55% acceptance rate.
  
• Within the 60-day span of the pilot, the NASAsphere community grew from 78 activated accounts to 295.
  
• Communications truly crossed geographic centers. When employees posed questions, 93% of the answers came from users at remote locations. By the end of the pilot, at least one person from every NASA center had participated in the NASAsphere community.
  
• A survey of NASAsphere users found that 52% recommended the platform be implemented for contractors and civilians, in addition to employees.
  
• In the same survey, 45% of users said they expected they would contribute to the NASAsphere platform weekly.
  
• Not surprisingly, the report recommends a broader implementation of the Socialcast solution.
  

For more details about the pilot and its results, check out the NASAsphere SlideShare presentation here or the final NASA JPL report here.