A Technology Architecture for Managing Explicit Knowledge Over the Entire Lifecycle of Large and Complex Projects

This is a three part presentation describing the development of a support engineering knowledge management system for the fleet of 10 ANZAC frigates engineered and constructed by Tenix Defence for the Australian and New Zealand Navies. Part 1 describes the nature of the knowledge that needs to be constructed and delivered for the ships to be safely operated and maintained, as well as some of the paradigmatic issues involved relating to the knowledge and document structures to be managed. Part 2 details the working environment and the business and systems architecture for authoring, managing and delivering knowledge to maintainers, and the specific systems implemented and how the architecture addresses the paradigmatic issues. Implementation of the system both dramatically increased the quality of the knowledge delivered and also dramatically reduced support engineering costs: 8,000 ship-specific maintenance procedures for 4 ships were reduced to 2,000 class-set of ‘SGML records’ for 10 ships; 5 people completely reworked 2,000 routines in around 3,000 person/hours; routines delivered for Ship 5 CUT 80%; subsequent content deliveries CUT 95%; keyboard time to incorporate one engineering change CUT more than 50%; cycle time to complete an engineering change CUT from up to a year to days. Part 3 explores how the system can be extended to other aspects of the lifecycle to form a complete fleet lifecycle knowledge management environment