The experience gathered on space station programs tells that process management is a key element of space operations. An increased emphasis has been placed on information sharing and knowledge management over the past few years on the International Space Station Program (ISSP). The demand to share knowledge both within and outside organizational boundaries has brought collaboration to the forefront on the program and spawned a variety of new architectural solutions that facilitate information distribution and knowledge acquisition. Combining the experience gathered on the space station programs along with "lessons learned" this paper1 introduces and discusses the business process management (BPM) methodology as a systematic approach on improving current mission design and support processes. The approach give rise to an enabling collaborative process that facilitates the creation, capture, and dissemination of information that creates corporate memory. The proposed methodology is a management discipline that looks at space mission support from the perspective of end-to-end cross-functional processes. The approach is supported by tools, which transform management perspective into solutions that automate, integrate, and monitor mission support processes. The paper also discusses a new role, which is required to implement the proposed approach - the Business Process Expert. A key function of the Business Process Expert is the translating a description of how the process works today and how it could be improved, into process models that are not just requirements, but the foundation of executable process implementations. New modeling standards now make this possible. A practical result of the work described in this paper is a set of web-based workflow prototypes with inherent features such as access management, e-mail alerts, status monitoring, role/task (re-)assignments, on-line validation, real-time follow-up, escalation, delegation, audit trail, to name a few. A customized off-the-shelf platform serves as a collaborative environment supporting most of the processes on space programs.The paper is forcing a reader to look more broadly at the mission support processes and move away from a "build-to-last" approach to designing the processes that are built for bringing them to perfection.
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