MITRE | The MITRE Digest | Social Contexts of Enterprise Systems Engineering

Social Contexts of Enterprise Systems Engineering

December 2008

Editor's note: This article and others on the topic of social and behavioral sciences research at MITRE can be found in the latest edition of our advanced technology newsletter, The Edge.

Often, MITRE must enable its customers to navigate transformational and transactional change simultaneously. MITRE's Social Contexts of Enterprise Systems Engineering (SCESE) project is conducting research to better understand such challenges and to identify strategies for addressing them.

For instance, Agency A and Agency B had overlapping missions but different chains of command, different budgets, and different security domains. When Congress passed a mandate that they share data, each agency developed an information sharing plan and submitted the plan to its respective director for approval. The director of Agency A approved the plan, however the director of Agency B objected. When the director of Agency A called his counterpart to discuss the matter, the director of Agency B cited the lack of budgetary control over Agency A as a rationale for withholding information.

As in the vignette above, MITRE is frequently faced with the social, organizational, political, and cultural complexities (hereafter referred to as "social contexts") of its sponsors' business in tandem with their technical issues. Yet as the environment in which systems engineering is practiced becomes progressively more complex, increasingly sophisticated technical skills and engineering processes require a complement of ever more sophisticated social science skills and management processes. The SCESE research project is an initiative to identify these social context skills and management processes.

The SCESE research design is using qualitative social science research techniques. In contrast to the quantitative methods of social science research (which rely on surveys, statistics, and lab experiments), qualitative research—both the data and results—is in the form of unstructured text (prose) rather than numerical measurements and calculations.

This research centers on a series of case studies of enterprise systems engineering programs. (A case study is a narrative history that highlights key participants, events, decisions, and outcomes of a particular situation or program—in this case, enterprise systems engineering programs.) The programs being studied have been chosen from the wide range of MITRE sponsors: military, civilian, and intelligence. Some programs have lengthy histories, others are relatively new; some have been identified as successes, others as at risk of failure. Virtually all of the programs under study are evolving even as they are being studied under this research.

Data for the research is being gathered primarily through a series of interviews—Tier 1 and Tier 2—for each case. Tier 1 interviews were conducted to collect general background information for each of five cases. This involved interviewing several engineers and/or managers, usually at their work site. Each interview lasted about 90 minutes and consisted of eight open-ended questions about the program being studied and the interviewee's perspective on it. When that baseline information was collected, research team members reviewed it and began writing a draft case (Tier 1) for each of the programs. Also during this time, the data was organized to use a software tool for analyzing qualitative data. As preliminary analysis continues, the researchers will interview more people in each program under Tier 2, gathering details about specific issues that have been identified through analysis of Tier 1 interview data and writing the Tier 1 case histories.

The final written cases will be released for distribution pending public release by their respective sponsors. Workshops are being developed for interested members of sponsor organizations and contractors who wish to review the case studies and discuss the social contexts of enterprise systems engineering (ESE). The workshops will serve to share the research findings and gather additional input about the next step of the research.

The results of this research effort should yield a better understanding of the social contexts that are often present in systems engineering projects that impact multiple independent organizations. The goal is to develop a guide or roadmap on how to recognize and address ESE issues and challenges. The social contexts include a more complete identification and recognition of all of the stakeholders and their different and sometimes incompatible motivations. Hence, it may not be possible to optimize the technical requirements of these constituencies. Further, the intersection of technology, budget, and people issues are not always explicitly acknowledged, yet are areas where many of the ESE challenges reside. Greater attention to incorporating the lessons learned into the project and sharing those lessons more broadly with other projects will lead to more successful outcomes and additional satisfied customers.

This research in the social context of enterprise systems engineering will allow MITRE to develop new insight into the key social, organizational, political, and cultural complexities that must be addressed to successfully implement technical solutions. These social science factors are also critical drivers of change in today's government environment, thus emphasizing the need for MITRE project teams to leverage our social behavioral scientists to meet the mission needs of our sponsors.

	Solutions That Make a Difference.® Copyright © 1997-2013, The MITRE Corporation. All rights reserved. MITRE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation. Material on this site may be copied and distributed with permission only.
	Privacy Policy \| Contact Us