In the late 1990s, the defense industry, no longer fighting the Cold War, was consolidating and downsizing. At Northrop Grumman Air Combat Systems (ACS), that presented more than just a short-term headache. As lead contractor for the B-2 Stealth bomber, an aircraft that was nearing the end of its production life, ACS was in danger of losing the expertise it needed to support and maintain a complex machine that would be flying?carrying precious lives and cargo?for years to come. So ACS instituted knowledge management procedures designed to capture the so-called tacit knowledge, or know-how and experience with the B-2, locked in its employees’ heads.

By 1999, with more cuts on the way?and with more knowledge in danger of being ushered out the door?Project Manager Scott Shaffar wanted to institute KM initiatives throughout the El Segundo, Calif.-based Northrop Grumman business unit. But before designing a program, Shaffar wanted to find out what barriers, if any, prevented employees from sharing knowledge with their peers. He figured that if he could apply hard numbers to ACS’s cultural attitudes about knowledge, he’d have a road map for designing a unitwide KM program and getting the funding for the technologies needed to facilitate it. So Shaffar decided to conduct a knowledge audit, surveying employees about their knowledge-sharing habits. That, he believed, would be a quick way to not only assess ACS’s readiness for a formal knowledge management effort but would also highlight those areas where sharing was not happening.

Shaffar hired Boston-based Delphi Group to conduct the audit and derive a baseline pulse of the unit’s knowledge-sharing culture.

"The audit helped us turn gut feelings into numbers," Shaffar says, adding that he suspected employees would find the self-contained nature of the unit’s programs a hindrance when it came to sharing knowledge. Now he’s using this information to implement a bigger KM project and get the funding he needs to build the systems to support it.

How Do They Know What They Know?

Knowledge management first gained a foothold in ACS’s B-2 bomber program in the late ’90s. As the B-2 program was winding down, and engineers with 20 or so years of experience were leaving, ACS established a 10-person KM team to identify subject matter experts and capture the content of their brain cells.

After creating about 100 knowledge cells (including armaments, software engineering, manufacturing and so on) and identifying 200 subject matter experts within those cells, the KM council turned its attention to knowledge capture. The team created websites for each of the knowledge cells and logged information about the knowledge experts into an expert locator system called Xref, short for cross-reference. Using Xref, employees can search for information in any number of ways, including by employee name, program affiliation or skill. If, for example, the B-2’s landing gear is locking up, one can find the landing gear expert through Xref.