Overview

The commercial sector's motivation for pursuing enterprise modernization programs is to conduct its businesses more effectively and efficiently—improving the bottom line. The federal government is also motivated—especially through directives and regulations from oversight organizations—to achieve more efficient, cost-effective operations and to provide better service to citizens.

Enterprise modernization is a complex, ongoing evolutionary process that involves the integrated transformation of strategies, policies, organization and governance structures, business processes and systems, and underlying technologies. Only by aligning these elements with its business goals can an agency achieve a successful modernization program.

Government agencies have the advantage of applying lessons learned from the commercial business world, which are based on the analysis of both modernization failures and successes. For example, commercial companies have taught us that organizational change management processes must be incorporated into all aspects of a modernization program. Also, although sometimes time-consuming to develop, a structured enterprise life cycle methodology and an enterprise architecture are essential. Every enterprise modernization program is different, reflecting the organization and its goals. Another lesson: Expect unintended consequences of change to become frequent events, driving the need for continuous decisions and strong governance.

All government information technology (IT) and modernization programs present major challenges, one of which is the acquisition process. While contract management in the federal sector has never been easy, enterprise modernization adds new levels of complexity. First, the government organization and its contractors are simultaneously developing new systems and improving legacy systems. Second, an enterprise approach to system integration is needed to ensure cost-effective interoperability among multiple systems within the organization and with other agencies' systems. Third, requirements and system design must be incrementally defined for the multiple enterprise-wide systems undergoing change in an enterprise modernization program.

So why would an organization choose to initiate a complex enterprise modernization program? The commercial sector's motivation for pursuing enterprise modernization programs is to conduct its businesses more effectively and efficiently—improving the bottom line. The federal government is also motivated—especially through directives and regulations from oversight organizations—to achieve more efficient, cost-effective operations and to provide better service to citizens.

One of the core drivers for change in government agencies is to eliminate costly IT project failures and to ensure that organizations align IT investments with their business and mission goals. A key objective of an enterprise architecture is to clearly describe the IT business alignment. In 1996, Congress passed the Clinger-Cohen Act, which requires all federal agencies to develop an enterprise architecture. In 2000 the Office of Management and Budget revised its Circular A-130 to require federal agencies to correlate their IT investment requests to their enterprise architectures.

MITRE has a long history of helping government sponsors modernize and transform their entire organizations. In the process we have learned that large systems and even "systems of systems" do not automatically scale to the enterprise level and that there are gaps in our understanding of enterprises and how they evolve. Though these gaps are shrinking, organizations still face many enterprise modernization challenges, including: managing complexity and making decisions across the enterprise life cycle through use of an enterprise architecture; developing the vision and strategy for change across multiple enterprise dimensions; and using commercial technologies to enable the vision.

The methods government organizations use to plan and implement enterprise modernization programs are evolving rapidly. MITRE is playing a role in this evolution, and helping agencies look more strategically at modernizing their organizations.

MITRE Practice Areas

Several factors drive enterprise modernization, in addition to the need to update organizational and business systems in response to mission requirements. These include the demands of laws and regulations, the advantages and risks presented by technological progress, and the expectations of customers and other stakeholders. Accordingly CEM has created three practice areas and three mission areas to meet the needs of our customers:

• Enterprise Engineering Practice
• Systems Engineering and Integration Practice
• Program Strategy and Management Practice

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