When much of your organization's business involves information technology, your own IT group had better be cutting edge. "In addition to helping MITRE run efficiently, the expertise and technologies developed by our IT division can often be used by our sponsors to help them achieve their missions," says David H. Lehman, senior vice president and MITRE's chief technology officer and chief information officer (CIO).

"We pass along lessons learned about how we at MITRE have enabled our people to work more effectively through better IT tools or techniques, and how we've managed to decrease costs while adding services," Lehman adds. "We've found that maintaining a top-notch IT system requires balancing user needs with the ability to control costs. You've got to have a strong user focus and pay attention to detail."

MITRE works for a wide variety of government organizations, from the Internal Revenue Service to the Department of Defense to the Federal Aviation Administration. Our job includes helping these agencies determine how to use IT to improve operations, as well as how to choose and use resources cost-effectively. To do that, MITRE engineers and scientists from across the organization research and test a wide variety of technologies, collecting best practices from industry and government.

The MITRE IT group (known as the Center for Information & Technology or CI&T) thus supports both MITRE's internal needs and, indirectly, those of our external customers. "The experience CI&T gains from testing new technologies can be used by our customers to evaluate their own technology requirements," says Lehman. "We've given customers our objective opinions on such tools as Storage Area Networks, Enterprise Systems Management, Expert Finder, Google, Blackberry, community software, and ConnectMe telephone-based voice service. In turn, we learn from our engineers who support the customers about best practices, product evaluations, and other in-depth technical knowledge. It's a lively two-way street."

Finding Expertise Quickly

To enable staff to share information easily and communicate across locations and centers, MITRE built an intranet 10 years ago, before they were commonly used, and has improved its breadth and function ever since. "We've consequently advised many government organizations on building their own intranets, using lessons we've learned from MITRE's intranet," says Joel Jacobs, Deputy CIO.

One area MITRE continually tries to improve on is better knowledge management through IT. MITRE, like most diverse corporations with many areas of expertise, has bits and pieces of knowledge tucked away all over the company, much of it on employees' computers. CI&T recently built and introduced a new tool called Expertise Finder that takes advantage of the company's intranet and its internal Google search engine.

"In a matter of seconds an employee can scan the company and identify people who have expert knowledge about a particular topic—say netted sensors—or even something as precise as chirality of nanotubes," says Jacobs. "Being able to find the right person quickly is very valuable, especially if you're at a remote site and the expert you need is not down the hall. It reduces the need for employees to send email blasts to the whole corporation, which may or may not result in a response.

"The Expertise Finder is able to rack and stack data so that you're likely to get the expert you need in the top five or ten hits. That's a level of efficiency very few companies have today. It's right in line with MITRE's goal of bringing all of the company's expertise to bear on its customers' problems," he adds. The Finder is one of many IT tools MITRE uses to support collaboration. Other collaboration tools include video-teleconferencing (with NetMeeting), community software (i.e., extranets), and Google.

The way MITRE works, coupled with the high quality of its staff, makes MITRE unique. "Because of our people and our missions [MITRE manages three federally funded research and development centers], we are held to a higher standard of excellence," says Jacobs. "Most large companies have almost absolute control over the configuration of their desktop systems to keep their administration costs down. Many of these companies don't allow users to install software or use floppy discs or other removable media.

"At MITRE, we would be pummeled if we exerted that kind of control," he adds. "A lot of our users work on the behalf of clients and access to the guts of machines is necessary to install software tools. There's a lot of flexibility allowed in their access to the internal systems."

Controlling IT Costs

CI&T also shares lessons on IT management with MITRE sponsors, helping them keep IT costs down, while continuing to improve services. Doing this at MITRE is one of Jacobs’ responsibilities. "The best way to keep costs down is to be realistic," explains Jacobs. "IT is an imperfect world and things change over time. Accepting a level of uncertainty, and learning how to manage it, will improve your cost management and improve affordability." For example, one expensive pitfall occurs when organizations go down the wrong technology path but are slow to recognize or admit it. IT organizations can also get into trouble by not keeping up with changes in technology and operational processes. One way CI&T assesses the needs of a wide variety of MITRE users is through its CIO Customer Council, which includes representatives from all over the organization. The representatives meet regularly with CI&T managers to discuss their needs and priorities. They also share information about what they've learned from sponsors back to CI&T, including external best practices.

Another way to cut costs is to approach this goal proactively. Jacobs and his staff are driving costs down by using resources more effectively. "We use efficient practices such as operating centralized email servers," says Jacobs. "We actively manage costs, for example, by getting our technicians certified to repair and maintain our network gear—as opposed to paying a vendor.

"We are vigilant about research, including service-level agreements," Jacobs adds. "Many companies find it's easy to fall out of the habit of doing analysis. Sooner or later, however, they get a big surprise. It's like people who continue to rent their phone from the phone company long after the phone is paid for—and then they realize there are much more cost-effective alternatives. But you have to pursue them.

"We also aggressively negotiate our licensing arrangements for things like Microsoft Office. You have to know what the art of 'possible' is with individual vendors. If you don't know what their arrangements are with other entities, then there's always the possibility of getting less than the best deal. This year we negotiated a new deal with our computer provider, which has the potential to save us more than $13 million, compared to our previous supplier.

"We can't be successful as an IT group without paying close attention to the market," he adds. "Our knowledge in this area is also very helpful to our sponsors."

—by David Van Cleave

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