Publication

The Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have participated in previous research efforts supporting the Marine Corps in the analysis and management of portfolios of systems and software solutions. In this research effort the SERC and GTRI expanded on that previous work to begin formalizing portfolio management methods into a reusable framework and explore new methods and strategies and that are extendable to systems of systems. Specifically, the research effort is comprised of three tasks:

1. Building upon work from RT-112, new modeling approaches and methodologies need to be developed and applied to the Log IT War Room analysis. For RT-112, the focus was on the Global Combat Support System – Marine Corps (GCSS-MC) which is one system of many with the Log IT portfolio. For that challenge, portfolio management strategies were applied to evaluate how different components could be combined to offer a complete solution for GCSS-MC. In this challenge, the strategies applied for GCSS-MC need to be reviewed for how they scale to a more complex system of systems and modified as necessary. Additionally, evaluation and scoring methods need to be developed which are specifically geared towards software-heavy systems such as those within the Log IT portfolio. Possible software attributes to be considered as inputs to these evaluation methods should be lines of code, open systems architecture, code quality, modularity, and age.
2. An initial task of the greater effort will require a complete functional decomposition of the tools and processes within the Log IT portfolio. In order to accomplish this effectively, a proper process, data collection, and organization strategy need to be defined and implemented for the team to operate. Proper execution of this task will ease the transition from functional decomposition to portfolio re-aggregation and evaluation. The research goal in this task is to identify the proper data elements that need to be collected for items within the Log IT portfolio so that modeling techniques can be applied. This will include developing a technique utilizing these data element inputs to identify overlaps and gaps in capabilities.
3. Data visualization techniques need to be designed and implemented to offer insightful visualizations to decision makers. Visualizations will be required for inspecting the functional decomposition as well as the scoring methodology for the portfolio re-aggregation. Preferred implementation of these visualizations is within the same tool supporting the functional decomposition and data gathering.