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This paper aims to describe knowledge productivity coaches and the approach Lockheed Martin has taken to ensure that its employees have the knowledge and skills needed to utilize its information system modeled after Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts and technologies. This information system is branded Unity.

To train the employee population (∼140,000 employees) in using Unity, a small team of knowledge productivity coaches was formed, who in turn mentor and coach more than 100 Unity ambassadors. These ambassadors are responsible for helping employees to understand the Unity platform and to utilize its related tools. A multitude of learning options are offered including Collaboration Playbooks, unMeetings (informal lunch‐n‐learn sessions on a specific Unity topic), videos, quick, short jump‐start guides, one‐on‐one coaching sessions, and personal assistance in setting‐up key team and personal spaces within the Unity environment. While the system is in many ways intuitive, these ambassadors provide the “human” link to learning.

The adoption rate of Unity has increased exponentially. Unity spaces increased 51 percent during the rollout in the third quarter of 2009. Much of this growth can be attributed to knowledge productivity coaches and ambassadors providing the support employees need to utilize Unity to increase their performance and productivity.

This strategy of using knowledge productivity coaches and ambassadors can be repeated for any large system implementation in the future. The methods and processes can also be leveraged to save time and money for every new program utilizing the strategy. This paper details the strategy and processes for reuse.

A reliability analysis of a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) system is presented for applications with strict constant power supply requirements, such as data centers. The purpose is to demonstrate the effect when moving from a module-level to a system-level in terms of reliability, also considering effects during start-up and degradation.

In-house experimental data on a system-level are used to capture the behavior during start-up and normal operation, including drifts of the operation point due to degradation. The system is assumed to allow replacement of stacks during operation, but a minimum number of stacks in operation is needed to avoid complete shutdown. Experimental data are used in conjunction with a physics-based performance model to construct the failure probability function. A dynamic program then solves the optimization problem in terms of time and replacement requirements to minimize the total negative deviation from a given target reliability.

Results show that multi-stack SOFC systems face challenges which are only revealed on a system- and not on a module-level. The main finding is that the reliability of multi-stack SOFC systems is not sufficient to serve as sole power source for critical applications such as data center.

The principal methodology may be applicable to other modular systems which include multiple critical components (of the same kind). These systems comprise other electrochemical systems such as further fuel cell types.

The novelty of this work is the combination of mathematical modeling to solve a real-world problem, rather than assuming idealized input which lead to more benign system conditions. Furthermore, the necessity to use a mathematical model, which captures sufficient physics of the SOFC system as well as stochasticity elements of its environment, is of critical importance. Some simplifications are, however, necessary because the use of a detailed model directly in the dynamic program would have led to a combinatorial explosion of the numerical solution space.