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Introduction to Enterprise Modernization
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. In this issue of The Edge, we outline the challenges surrounding enterprise-wide change programs, describe processes and tools that are contributing to success on these programs, and identify unresolved problems that need to be addressed through further research and development. During the past several decades enterprise evolution was strongly driven by the rapid changes in information technologies. In both private industry and the government, billions of dollars—much of it now deemed to have been wasted on IT expenditures—were narrowly focused on technical infrastructure upgrades or stove-piped legacy systems modernization, rather than being focused on the business needs of the organization as a whole. A positive outcome of the massive number and size of the IT project failures was the realization during the mid 1990s that IT modernization is just one component of enterprise modernization, and that a broad blueprint—in the form of an enterprise architecture—is critical to guide an enterprise modernization program. 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. In this issue of The Edge, we discuss the elements of enterprise modernization, such as enterprise architecture concepts and the frameworks upon which these architectures are built. We also look at organizational change management, a thread that runs through all change programs but becomes more complicated by the need to manage concurrent changes across all enterprise dimensions. We discuss how MITRE is addressing modernization challenges through direct support to sponsors and through a wide-ranging portfolio of research and development projects that focus on a variety of problems relevant to enterprise modernization. |
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| For more information, please contact guest editors Anne Cady or Mike Blom using the employee directory. Page last updated: November 12, 2003 | Top of page |
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