Europe’s aviation and air traffic control industry has always had the highest focus on safety-critical processes and best practice. However, how does an industry move to continually promote best practice and capture its knowledge among different stakeholders across nearly 40 countries, from air traffic controllers to Government ministers?

Safety knowledge
Eurocontrol, the umbrella organisation for safety of air navigation, is currently addressing this complex goal with a unique aviation industry knowledge management platform called “SKYbrary”. The goal is to organise the world’s aviation safety knowledge and make it universally accessible and used.

Success story
The organisation needed a way to provide a wide range of stakeholders with the latest thinking and best practice in aviation safety. According to Tzvetomir Blajev, the project manager: 'Although SKYbrary was originally inspired by Wikipedia, it differs in that it depends on the professional expertise and wisdom of highly qualified authors, editors and content managers in a centralised quality control model, rather than a distributed one.' A good year after its launch, SKYbrary now contains 1700 articles, has an average visit rate of 750 users per day and has over 600 registered users and enjoys the support of ICAO, the Flight Safety Foundation, UKFSC, and EASA/ESSI.

Support
DNV has supported Eurocontrol in the design and development of the SKYbrary site and its knowledge management processes. Currently, DNV is helping Eurocontrol to create new functionalities and further integration of additional knowledge sources into the site, such as the All Clear and the Level Bust toolkits. The latest addition is a search engine that allows users to retrieve standards and recommended practices for aviation professionals from ICAO annexes and documents. With ICAO search on SKYbrary it is much easier to trace the way of working in a certain situation.

Re-think
This project supports the idea that knowledge can be captured and shared in complex safety-critical environments, whether in aviation or in other industries. The success of SKYbrary to date reinforces the DNV belief that successful organisations must re-think and develop their knowledge management (KM) processes to understand how personnel use information, access new information channels, make operational decisions and build a corporate language.

Captured and shared
This project supports DNV in thinking that with the identification of an organisation’s improvement objectives, establishment of KM processes and appropriate supporting systems, knowledge can be captured and shared in complex safety-critical environments, whether in aviation or in other industries.