NASA: the digital future of space exploration

NASA is a young federal agency with fewer than 100 birthdays under its belt. That modernity ought to be a launchpad fit for digital transformation. But the organisation that first put a man on the moon and has continued to lead space exploration in the intervening 60-odd years is travelling light when it comes to legacy tech baggage.

Ron Thompson is NASA’s chief data officer and deputy digital transformation officer. He explains that, while NASA is a relatively ‘new’ agency, many of its operational and organisational models were passed down from existing agencies at its inception. “The way the agency works is really routing physical paper artifacts, for different activities and a lot of that culture was based around routing mail,” Thompson explains. “It’s mail codes how the organisations operate and how systems are designed to support the agency”

It’s little surprise then that Thompson is an advocate for changing cultural and workforce norms in order to usher in a digital transformation programme. “It’s really looking at the enterprise and working holistically, finding areas of opportunity to share and breaking down those mail code barriers and the system barriers that were in place based on those mail codes, interoperability is the name of the game.”

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