The MITRE Corporation is a not-for-profit organization with expertise in systems engineering, information technology, operational concepts, and enterprise modernization. In addition to managing several Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs), MITRE supports its own independent technology research and application development for solving sponsors near-term and future problems. MITRE has approximately 7000 scientists, engineers, and support specialists distributed across many locations and working on hundreds of different projects for various sponsors in numerous domains.

MITRE employees have traditionally relied on email, telephone, and face-to-face meetings to communicate and collaborate with external partners. Artifacts distributed via email get lost or conflicts occur when different copies of materials are edited. Telephone conversations are ephemeral, and face-to-face meetings involve travel and scheduling issues. The company also uses an external Microsoft SharePoint site as a secure document repository, but the strict authentication requirements, the lack of lightweight functionality, and the limited social aspects of the tool make it difficult for users to connect socially and collaborate. Forming ad hoc group workspaces around topical areas is also difficult with existing tools.

In addition to these problems, individuals want to be able to establish relationships with external parties and manage those contacts as people move from job to job. The recent popularity of tools like LinkedIn and Facebook make connecting and tracking possible, but they are not trusted environments for conducting business and are fraught with overwhelming amounts of personal and extraneous information. As a result, it is currently difficult to capture the business networks and relationships that MITRE staff have with people from other organizations.

To address these and other collaboration issues, a research team at MITRE embarked upon building a trusted environment for MITRE and its partners to connect, collaborate, and share new information. Our goals were to improve MITREs ability to establish and maintain relationships, form groups and facilitate multiorganizational collaboration around topics, leverage expertise from industry, and bring broader segments of the community to bear on important sponsor problems. In addition, we wanted to enhance the individual and enterprise situational awareness around relationships, activities, topics, and communities.

A specific focus of this project was how to address and mitigate the risks of this new capability. We needed to ensure that the social networking platform supporting both internal and external access and its data-level access model were both secure and usable. From a research perspective, we were also interested in exploring and assessing the value of an enterprise networking tool for business use as well as identifying and evaluating emerging business models enabled by social networking tools. Could the enterprise move away from supporting teams to leveraging networks and make the enterprise, as a whole, more efficient?

Before selecting and deploying a social networking tool, we started by gathering requirements and identifying business need use cases. We conducted work practice studies by interviewing and observing MITRE employees who were engaged in cross-organizational projects and teams with sponsors, vendors, contractors, consultants, academia, and other FFRDCs. We documented work practices, assessed needs that were not being met, identified breakdowns and ineffective use of existing technology, and collected additional requirements for our prototype tool.

The team also explored existing social networking tools and products including commercial technology, open source tools, and hosted platforms to understand what functionality and options existed. We used this data, along with extensive criteria, to select an appropriate tool that would support a broad spectrum of research efforts.

Once we had a research platform selected, we built upon it and deployed it outside our firewall. We identified teams and partners to support as we piloted the tool and used their feedback to make improvements. We leveraged these pilots to study risks and costs, deployment mechanics, use and usage issues, integration, and cultural and political dynamics. Throughout this process, we worked with several teams to create a framework for evaluating social media and a multi-fold plan for assessing the value of business networking for the enterprise and for the individual.

Case Study Questions

1. What has been the cause of MITRE failing to track its business networks and relationships (5 Marks)
2. What approach did MITRE use to resolve this problem. (5 Marks)