Enterprise Systems Engineering

Systems engineering considers the requirements of all stakeholders with the goal of providing a quality product delivered on time, on budget, and meeting the needs of each customer's circumstances.

Overview

Federal government systems such as the Global Information Grid (GIG), National Airspace System, and the Department of Homeland Security's Secure Border Initiative system, SBINet, are immensely complex and, increasingly, interdependent. As the missions of different government agencies become more interrelated, the systems and processes that support those missions grow correspondingly more complex. Traditional systems engineering approaches are evolving to address the challenge of such enterprise systems, many of which cross organizational boundaries.

To deliver value to the users of the systems in these enterprises requires the disciplined methods and big-picture mindset of traditional systems engineering, coupled with newer enterprise systems engineering (ESE) methods aimed at addressing increased complexity. In our ESE work, we engineer the enterprise and we engineer the systems that enable the enterprise. In particular, we help customers shape their enterprises by aligning technology to support business and policy goals. We also determine how well the individual systems in an enterprise perform and how they affect each other. We provide architecture development, strategic planning, systems integration, and risk analysis services to customers across a wide spectrum of military and civil government agencies. MITRE is working to advance ESE methods and thinking through research, in the classroom, and on the job.

In pursuit of these goals, MITRE is developing models and diagnostic tools to pinpoint real-world strategies and practices for complex systems engineering on an enterprise scale. One such tool, the Enterprise Systems Engineering Profiler, is gaining momentum both across MITRE and among our customers. The Profiler serves as a framework to help the systems engineer understand the nature of a given system in four critical dimensions: strategic, acquisition, stakeholder, and system behavior. MITRE is collaborating with the academic community, practitioners, and customers to refine and extend the Profiler and to develop practices that are customized to address specific engineering problems.

MITRE addresses integration and interoperability issues and enterprise systems engineering challenges through the Integration and Interoperability Council, Directors of Integration, and the Capstone Program. The six mission areas of primary focus are Mission Assurance, Joint Network Integration, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, Data and Services, Operations/Intelligence, and Command and Control. The intent of the group is to highlight opportunities to promote and achieve Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) integration and interoperability across the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.

And as part of our commitment to advancing the overall systems engineering discipline, we are offering educational opportunities to our employees and sponsors. MITRE engineers at our McLean, Va., and Bedford, Mass., offices, along with our sponsors' military and civilian personnel, can enroll in a jointly administered MITRE and Johns Hopkins University program to earn a Master of Science degree in Systems Engineering. The program provides students with the skills necessary for the planning, development, and engineering of complex systems. The program mirrors MITRE's real-world approach to systems engineering and includes courses in conceptual design; system project management; software system engineering processes; system design, test, and integration; and decision and risk analysis.

Current Work Programs

Examples of our work in this area include:

• Supporting the Army through ongoing systems engineering and design work on the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). The DCGS-A system provides Army intelligence users around the world with improved insight into the insurgency threat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The system gives users of all classification levels and ranks the ability to unearth critical information from intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sources and to identify relationships among persons, events, and organizations.
• Conducting a feasibility study to address the development of an affordable and viable system for detecting the presence of airborne pathogens on aircraft in flight. This research explores the development of a miniature biosensor system to be placed at strategic locations throughout an aircraft to deliver fast, reliable results. In addition, we are collaborating with 10 institutions including Harvard University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to demonstrate the feasibility of biodetection using aerosol technology.
• Advancing the President's goal of providing the majority of Americans with access to electronic health records by 2014 through our work in support of the Federal Health Architecture initiative in developing healthcare IT standards for federal agencies and public, private, state, and local entities. We are also coordinating federal participation in the Health Information Technology Standards Panel, a national collaborative promoting the adoption of health information technology standards.
• Working with the Department of Homeland Security to establish a common definition of a secure border and developing tools that aid in the decision making to achieve it. These included a modeling and simulation capability, developed at MITRE, which makes it possible to envision the impact of proposed changes to immigration policy relating to legal and illegal immigration.
• Helping the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, along with the intelligence community, to connect more than 100 command and control systems that previously were unable to interoperate.
• Supporting the Internal Revenue Service and other civil agencies in major enterprise modernization efforts, including systems integration, risk management, and defining, managing, and improving their enterprise information technology life cycles.
• Working with the Department of Veterans Affairs to advance the transition to a new federated model for information sharing.
• Working with the Federal Aviation Administration to increase the capacity and efficiency of the national airspace, reduce flight delays and traffic management constraints, and enhance flexibility in the use of aviation system resources.
• Helping the Department of Defense define the critical components of the Global Information Grid, a single, secure infrastructure designed to provide new capabilities to warfighters.
• Supporting the Air Force in managing Air and Space Operations Centers.

Related Information

Articles and News

• MITRE's Security Standards Support Massive Government IT Alignment
• Zapping System Bugs Through Performance Engineering
• The Utility of the "Ilities": Flexible Planning for an Uncertain Future
• Uncommon Sensors May Help Secure our Ports and Borders
• New Lab Serves as a Growing Resource for Tough Challenges
• Ready for Prime Time: Putting the Byte on Crime and Terrorism
• A Bright Idea Becomes an FAA Rule
• ORmadillos Dig into Complex Operations Research Problems
• Giving Military Information Sharing a Little More Backbone
• Role of Unifying Disaster Response Rests on USNORTHCOM's Shoulders
• Lifting Aviation off the Ground: Planning the Next Generation Air Transportation System
• Swift Travel: A Glimpse into the Future of Airport Information Management

Technical Papers and Presentations

• Information Technology Acquisition: A Common-Sense Approach
• The Changing Nature of Systems Engineering and Government Enterprises
• Profiling Complex Systems
• Theater Battle Management Core System: Lessons for Systems Engineers
• Asks the Chief Engineer: "So What Do I Go Do?!"
• Case Studies in Enterprise Systems Engineering
• Findings of Case Studies on Enterprise Systems Engineering (Presentation)
• Hybrid Systems Dynamic, Petri Net, and Agent-Based Modeling of the Air and Space Operations Center
• AviationSimNet: Integration Manual
• Engineering the Enterprise
• Enterprise Systems Engineering Theory and Practice, Vol. 9: Enterprise Research and Development
• A Multi Scale Definition of a System

Websites

• 2007 MITRE Technology Symposium - Enterprise and Systems Architecture and Engineering (ESAE)
• 2007 MITRE Technology Symposium - Decision Support
• 2007 MITRE Technology Symposium - Modeling and Simulation
• 2006 MITRE Technology Symposium - Enterprise and Systems Architecture and Engineering (ESAE)
• 2005 MITRE Technology Symposium - Enterprise Architectures
• 2004 MITRE Technology Symposium - Enterprise Architectures
• Systems Engineering Practice Office (SEPO)

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