Investment Strategies -- Projects

Adapting Private Sector Virtualization Strategies to Federal Agencies

Enterprise Lifecycle Investment Management

Investment Strategies

Investment Strategies is concerned with understanding the benefits and direction of planned and future technology investments by the government. Responsibilities include capturing information on trends in technology investments, understanding the challenges associated with investment decisions, and improving MITRE's abilities to support technology investment studies. The latter includes methods and tools for investment analysis, as well as supporting databases. At present, the technical area team is researching the following broad areas: information technology investments, militarily critical technology investments, and aviation technology investments.

Adapting Private Sector Virtualization Strategies to Federal Agencies

Kevin Buck, Principal Investigator

Bedford and Washington

Problem
Today’s dynamic IT environment is driving the need for infrastructures and architectures that ensure the highest levels of flexibility, functionality, cost-effectiveness, timeliness, and security. Business virtualization (e.g., Web-Enabled Services) has been identified as a potential means of addressing today’s network computing challenges. Maximizing benefits from business virtualization requires that numerous investment risks (e.g., regulatory compliance, IT security, and technical integration) be mitigated.

Objectives
This research team is addressing three issues fundamental to virtualization: (1) Can and should agencies virtualize? (2) Which business and technical architectures should agencies define as a target state? (3) What should the roadmap for arriving at that target state look like, and how should the agency migrate its systems, personnel, and culture?

Activities
In Phase I, the research team developed a framework to help agencies mitigate virtualization risks and determine if virtualization is appropriate. In Phase II, the team applied this framework to support selection of appropriate architectures. In Phase III, the framework will be expanded to evaluate regulatory versus security tradeoffs related to outsourcing in the post-9/11 environment.

Impacts
When government agencies implement business virtualization strategies, these research findings will support them in more effectively adopting performance management best practices, applying supportive organizational designs, building flexible technology infrastructure and application architectures that can be effectively integrated and easily maintained, and applying appropriate technology enablers (e.g., XML, EAI).

Enterprise Lifecycle Investment Management

Bruce W. Lamar, Principal Investigator

Bedford and Washington

Problem
CEM's sponsors must make sound, results-oriented resource allocation and investment decisions across the full investment life cycle. An analytically based decision-making process that is consistent with the organization’s existing enterprise engineering framework is needed to provide sponsors with a robust capability to achieve repeatable, traceable, defensible investment decisions.

Objectives
The first objective is to establish a “gold standard” for investment management analyses within the CEM sponsor, government oversight, and vendor communities. The second objective is to integrate and extend current investment analysis methods/tools and processes by encompassing the full investment management life cycle and by aligning with established enterprise engineering and architecture frameworks (e.g., TEAF, FEAF).

Activities
The project will first review literature/products pertaining to lifecycle portfolio management; second, integrate the prototype investment analysis tools; third, extend the tool capabilities in order to support life cycle investment decisions that are aligned with the organization's enterprise engineering processes and enterprise architecture; fourth, conduct a case study with a CEM sponsor; and fifth, engage the vendor/government oversight communities.

Impacts
Results of this project should strengthen support for CEM sponsors that are engaged in enterprise-level programs by helping decision makers find optimal portfolios throughout the investment life cycle. Our work will provide synergy with ongoing MITRE research efforts in enterprise architectures and will provide an opportunity for technology transfer.