Projects

NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Knowledge Management Brochure (Adobe PDF 300KB)		Technology Tamers Inc. is currently engaged in developing and conducting Knowledge Management and Cultural Change Workshops for the Marshall Space Flight Center Engineering Directorate. The purpose of this task is to provide knowledge management awareness and cultural change to increase knowledge capture, utilization and innovation. Training will be conducted in multiple classroom sessions to an Engineering Directorate management and engineering staff target audience. The course sessions will actively engage the participants in exploring the relationships between raw data and real knowledge as well as knowledge models and the resultant decision-action outcomes.
*Boeing Corporation*		Over the past four years The Boeing Company contracted with Technology Tamers, Inc. to evaluate, report and improve the knowledge management systems in place at their Canoga Park California Division of Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power, specifically focusing on the Space Shuttle Main Engine Program. SSME is the largest single Program at BCP comprising 600 employees with some staff deployed remotely at Marshall Space Flight Center, Stennis Space Center and Kennedy Space Flight Center. The Program is divided into Component Level Integrated Product Teams and Departments with processes that are managed separately while integrating between teams and components. There is a lot of communication and co-ordination that must occur to keep such a complex system as the Space Shuttle Main Engine running safely, smoothly and efficiently. Knowledge Management plays a large role in maintaining the quality of service NASA has come to expect from this ongoing Program with a 30-year legacy and a future life expectancy of another 25 years. This effort is funded by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. The integrated Knowledge Management of the Space Shuttle Main Engine program is an awesome and ambitious task at many levels and we are very excited to be invited to participate in its evaluation, overview and development. 2003 - 2004 Space Shuttle Main Engine knowledge capture implementation - develop knowledge management educational program Our task in this Boeing contract was to implement the knowledge capture system we designed in previous contracts at SSME. The scope of the contract also required us to research, design and implement a knowledge management educational system that informs, motivates and trains members of the Boeing community to use these new systems and to embrace the changes in information handling that results in higher levels of productivity and innovation. Using this KM training program we instructed directors and managers on the philosophy of KM systems, use of the tools available and methods to inspire their teams to participate in knowledge management activities. 2002 Space Shuttle Main Engine Tacit Knowledge and Critical Skills Report In 2002 we were awarded a contract with The Boeing Company to examine, assess and to recommend improvements in the Space Shuttle Main Engine Program for tacit knowledge and critical skills management. In the next ten years 25% of the engineers at Boeing will be eligible for retirement. This potential loss of intellectual capital needs to be addressed by systems that capture, store and utilize the knowledge and experience of these workers. Our research examined efforts currently underway at SSME to alleviate the impact of these retirements. We proposed organizational structures and methodologies designed to augment these undertakings. These activities were distributed throughout the SSME community by a report that was made available via the corporate intranet. 2001 Space Shuttle Main Engine Knowledge Management Strategic Report Our job in this initial contract was to examined current information systems at SSME and look for ways to improve the accumulation, retention and sharing of knowledge both tacit and explicit. We evaluated the information technology systems, formal and informal information gathering, mentoring and educational processes and cultural aspects of their current knowledge management systems in place. The results of this research and our considered opinions were submitted in a briefing and a series of strategy reports.
*Childhelp*		The Village of Childhelp East, a camp/residential treatment facility for severely neglected and abused children commissioned the development of a campus wide data entry, retrieval and analysis system customized to their unique requirements. Ms. Singer-Owens has completed phase one of the multiphase project, doing the initial development and deployment in Microsoft SQL Server 2000 as the data engine with as Access 2000 .adp, (Access Data Project), as the client-side application interface. Specialized reporting is accomplished via automation that creates excel pivot tables and charts as well as Data Access Pages using interactive Web COM objects such as pivot tables and ActiveX chart and calendar objects. We are very excited about this current effort involving some complex heterogeneous data sets being analyzed together to extrapolate new trends and glean hitherto unnoticed (or at least undocumented) correlations between such things as a child's behavior changes over time and his medication changes and/or contact visitation episodes and/or domicile and social worker changes.
*Albemarle County, VA* Child Nutrition Program		The Child Nutrition Department of the County of Albemarle commissioned us to develop an integrated system that tracks all the food products ordered throughout the 24 different school cafeteria sites and allows for the data collection of daily meal counts and deposits across the wide area network, in addition to free and reduced breakfast and lunches served for reporting to the state. The system generates the monthly SL12 for State reimbursement processing. It allows Cafeteria managers to do their inventory tracking for both SYSCO bid items and USDA Commodity products. It also allows the department to match State generated legacy ASCII delimited data from the FIPS003 status records to be automatically matched with SASIxp student records, (which is county’s Student Records proprietary system).
Extended Day Care Program		The Extended Day Enrichment Program, hosted by the Albemarle County Public Schools had us develop an accounting and attendance tracking system which integrates payment and attendance information from four separate enrichment programs (Before School, After School, Inclement Weather and Student Holiday). 15 school sites input attendance and child demographics information, the 4 central office associates send out billing and receive payments and generate reports for various needs, 6 Finance Window Tellers take payments for services pre-purchased each cycle, all integrated across the WAN. Many reports are generated for this application like average daily attendance, child teacher ratios, children who attend for more days than they bought services, some services purchased expire per cycle while other “discretionary days” roll over and are credited to the next billing cycle, snow day credits can be mandated and added to the calculations etc. The application mines the data record changes from SASIxp so the EDEP customers remain synchronized with the legacy school record information. The application generates a deposit report that aggregates payments taken against services purchased by school and program and fee type for input into the County Mainframe accounting system.