Center for Enterprise Modernization (CEM)

Internal Revenue Service/Department of Veterans Affairs FFRDC

CEM's commitment to strategic partner­ship begins with adopting its customer's mission as its own and developing best practices for the evolving discipline of enterprise modernization.

Overview

MITRE's Center for Enterprise Modernization (CEM), operator of a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Internal Revenue Service and co-sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs, works to advance the technology infrastructure of our nation's civilian government agencies. Other agencies that CEM supports include the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) at the Department of the Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Departments of Labor, Interior, and Agriculture.

We collaborate with these organizations to help them transform the way they do business for the American public. The goal of our work is to enable these agencies to more efficiently acquire, integrate, manage, and operate the business and information technology systems critical to the services they provide.

Strategic Depth, Tactical Precision

Through our efforts and expertise in systems engineering, enterprise-level integration, change management, economic analysis, acquisition management, and government infrastructure, we help government agencies address the challenge of implementing large-scale, long-term technology modernization programs. This enables them to more effectively fulfill their missions and, in some cases, add new capabilities or assume new responsibilities.

We offer a strategic systems perspective on the most prominent enterprise modernization challenges facing government agencies. But enterprise modernization involves more than just information systems—it encompasses an organization's entire operation. For example, the IRS wants to incorporate responsive customer service into every transaction. This requires changing business processes and building organizational awareness while simultaneously updating information technology. As a trusted partner, MITRE provides the integrated mix of strategic, technical, and program management advice and recommendations that help make such transitions successful.

Evolving the Practice of Enterprise Modernization

Working closely with our IRS and VA sponsors and other federal customers, we continue to develop their understanding of the specific enterprise modernization challenges that confront government agencies today. Among our recent successes:

• To address the complex issues surrounding fuel tax collections, the IRS turned to MITRE for assistance with an unprecedented operation: a Joint Operations Center for National Fuel Tax Compliance (JOC). Our team assessed whether a fully realized JOC—with participation from all relevant states and agencies in the future—is feasible, and we played a key role in moving the JOC from concept to reality. The JOC has dramatically improved the abilities of the IRS and its partner states to address the multi-billion dollar deficits in the Federal Highway Trust Fund and its state counterparts, while also enabling new federal and state fuel tax compliance initiatives and enhancing tax-related reporting by industry.
• The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has enlisted MITRE's help to conduct a comprehensive review of internal procedures for evaluating TCRs—tips, complaints, and referrals. The SEC receives hundreds of thousands of TCRs per year from investors and the general public, as well as from those the SEC regulates, including broker-dealers, investment advisers, and public companies. The agency is seeking to establish a centralized process to better identify valuable leads for potential enforcement action and areas of high risk for compliance examinations. As part of this work, MITRE is helping the SEC identify ways to improve the quality and efficiency of its current procedures.
• When Congress passed the Post-9/11 GI Bill in spring 2008, the Department of Veterans Affairs had less than 13 months to implement it. MITRE assisted VA in constructing a two-pronged approach, including defining a long-term project to develop a fully automated system for processing the new claims.VA then asked us to take on the second, near-term task—defining an interim system for use until the long-term one was up and running. We developed business logic and computational algorithms for use in VA's claims processing that provide the basis for software tools to compute a veteran's GI Bill benefits. The short-term solution met the deadline and began allowing benefits distribution on August 1, 2009. Our contribution was acknowledged when representatives from the CEM team were invited to attend President Obama's presentation of the first benefit check under the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

10 Major Functional Areas

Our staff provides practical advice and insight grounded in a solid understanding of the realities faced by civilian government agencies. Through the CEM, MITRE offers technical expertise in 10 major functional areas:

• Infrastructure engineering and operations
• Enterprise acquisition strategy and management
• Investment planning and management strategy
• Enterprise architecture
• Enterprise information assurance
• Information management and analysis
• Organizational change management
• Strategic business and enterprise planning
• Enterprise systems engineering and integration
• Program management

Related Information

Articles and News

• Post-9/11 GI Bill Helps Department of Veterans Affairs Expand Education Benefits
• Social Networking Technology: From Cave Drawings to Twitter
• Share and Share Alike: Building an Information Interoperability Toolkit
• MITRE's Cyber Security Operations Center Helps Sponsors Keep Networks Secure
• Innovative Collaborative Community Helps Warfighters Connect the Dots
• Universal Core Advances Information Sharing Across Government Agencies
• Smooth Moves: Helping Military Families Transition to New Homes
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Take Health IT Lead
• Many Happy Returns: Gaining Converts to e-File
• MITRE Security Standards Support Massive Government IT Alignment
• Building with Cyber-Steel to Protect Government Networks
• Private Eyes: Keeping Personal Information Safe
• Social Contexts of Enterprise Systems Engineering
• Building Collective Strength: Transforming Military Medical Education and Training
• Understanding Customers' Technology Needs

Technical Papers and Presentations

• Systems of Systems and Net-Centric Enterprise Systems
• Do You Know Where Your Data's Been? Tamper-Evident Database Provenance
• Leveraging Federal IT Investment Using SOA (Executive Version)
• Service-Oriented Acquisitions
• Seven Significant Challenges for Federal Leaders Employing SOA
• Selected MITRE Cyber-Related Research and Initiatives
• Information Technology Acquisition: A Common-Sense Approach
• Agent-Directed Simulation for Systems Engineering
• Achieving Effective Results in Acquisition: Guidelines for Recommended Actions
• Performance Management at R&D Organizations: Practices and Metrics from Case Examples
• Host-Based Firewall with Dynamic Encryption Capability

Websites

• Our Work: Large-Scale Enterprise Transformation
• Our Work: Healthcare Transformation
• Research Areas: Enterprise and Systems Architecture and Engineering
• About Us: Federal Sector Modernization
• About Us: Judicial Engineering and Modernization Center (JEMC)

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