Information Technology Research, Innovation, and E-Government (2002) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
4 Technology Transition and Program Management: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Impact
4 Technology Transition and Program Management: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Impact
Pages 88-116
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 88... ...
Indeed, many major IT innovations have followed paths with duration, complexity, and diversity of players rarely foreseen by the original innovators. This phenomenon was well illustrated in the 1995 CSTB report on the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, which offered a Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB)
|
From page 89... ...
The teaming structure of the NSF Digital Government program can accelerate this process, but it does not replace it. The right combination of careful manage
|
From page 90... ...
SOURCE: 2002 update by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of a figure originally published in Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research
|
From page 91... ...
Council, 1995, Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
|
From page 92... ...
The NSF's Digital Government program illustrates that there is a natu
|
From page 93... ...
· Are there fundamental difficulties in adjusting the human interfaces in a concept-demonstration system to conform better with organizational culture and practices? · Can the new technology scale up appropriately to expected and potential operational levels?
|
From page 94... ...
STRATEGIES AND MODELS FOR PROGRAM MANAGEMENT How can researchers, research managers, acquisition managers, and users develop successful strategies in this complex and changing environment? The sections below present an approach that is based on three principal elements: 1.
|
From page 95... ...
· The supply chain, or technology food chain, is an identification of stakeholders and the relationships between them involved in transforming a new technical idea into operational reality (see Box 4.2~. Because this model is useful in understanding the respective roles and interests of stakeholders in the process of developing and delivering capability, it can help guide a program manager in identifying potential partners in an innovation process.
|
From page 96... ...
Market strategy issues include, for example, whether to focus on adaptation of existing components to provide some new capability or to stimulate a new component market that packages the capability. The model for budget management used in the DOD for research, development, test, and evaluation addresses the dimensions of risk explicitly by categorizing funds used for programs (e.g., 6.1, 6.2, 6.3a, and 6.5)
|
From page 97... ...
Larger mission agencies such as DOD, DOE, NASA, and NIH do some of this custom work in their own, internal engineering organizations and affiliated laboratories. In some cases, the custom engineering can be replaced by using vertically tailored products from domain specialists (for example, geographic information systems)
|
From page 99... ...
The research manager needs to have a nuanced understanding of the respective roles, capabilities, and interests of participants in the supply chain in order to maximize impact of a mission-oriented research program. The innovation enterprises and R&D strategies in the major mission agencies such as DOD, DOE, NASA, and NIH have therefore been structured in recognition of the scale, diversity, and depth (beyond firsttier integrators and vendors)
|
From page 100... ...
The research plan addressed scaling issues from the outset, in order to address challenges of long system lifetimes and broad spans of deployment (potentially scaling up to millions of users within DOD alone)
|
From page 101... ...
Indeed, acquisition program managers whose principal incentive is to achieve predictability of outcome rather than enhancement to overall mission capability may make overly cautious choices that do not lead to optimal long-term outcomes. A system integrator's interest in research-generated innovation may thus be limited, as it represents a potentially disruptive influence on that company's way of doing business and could even undermine its competitive advantages.6 However, there are numerous collaborative relationships between basic researchers in universities and their counterparts in vendor organizations, for such reasons as providing the vendor with previews of new technology developments or better access to educational programs and professional talent.
|
From page 102... ...
If the concepts have promise and the risks of further development and scale-up are acceptable, then the DOD will stimulate collaboration between those research teams and vendor or integrator organizations. The DOD invests in this participation in order to "buy down the risk" of commercial organizations committing resources, assimilating innovations, and developing underlying technological infrastructure in advance of concrete evidence of a market.
|
From page 103... ...
In this section, several dimensions of risk are identified, along with some examples of strategies that can be used to mitigate the risks and thereby move innovations closer to adoption. This framework enables program managers to put names to risks and strategies and to identify the risk focus at a particular stage of program execution; addressing too many risk issues at once in a program can compound overall program risk to unacceptable levels.
|
From page 105... ...
In large-scale engineering projects, there can be considerable evaluation risk with respect to life-cycle issues such as interoperation, evolvability, and reuse. In digital-government programs in particular, evaluation risk is present in the definition and development of infrastructure for major information and transaction portals, in the use of advanced collaboration technologies to facilitate intragovernmental processes, and in the development of software technologies to support and evolve highly dependable systems.
|
From page 106... ...
This approach (named by Michael Dertouzos) can enable researchers working with early adopters both to make midcourse corrections and to collaborate with the adopters in defining evaluation criteria.8 The resulting "early validation" can help reduce evaluation risk even when objective measures are unavailable.
|
From page 107... ...
When early projects were initiated in parallel computing, for example, a diversity of architectural approaches were considered, which yielded a number of different options that permit a number of different classes of problems to be tackled today. One example of solution-concept risk in the domain of digital government is the development of technologies to model and remediate unwanted linking of databases (e.g., to prevent revealing identities of medical-research subjects)
|
From page 108... ...
Project managers may be tempted to constrain solution concepts prematurely in order to obtain a more linear program execution model with predictable milestones. This optimization in favor of near-term predictability may actually increase overall solution concept risk because it compresses or eliminates the exploratory phases critical to the invention or identification of new solution concepts.
|
From page 109... ...
The mock-ups also help researchers communicate with potential adopters by providing a concrete instantiation of concepts; where appropriate, they may also serve as surrogates for formal specification of requirements or technological capabilities. The Wizard of Oz tactic thus also addresses risks related to evaluation, integration, and usability.
|
From page 110... ...
This is analogous to, but not the same as, the alignment of end users and innovators in mission programs, including NSF's Digital Government program. The distinction is that the producer-consumer model is focused on building links in the supply chain, while the NSF Digital Government program emphasizes directly connecting the producer and consumer.
|
From page 111... ...
Widely adopted frameworks for example, mainstream commercial application programming interfaces (APIs) can provide significant interoperation benefit in mission systems.
|
From page 112... ...
Interoperation risk at the system level can be addressed through the creation of scaffolded components. In scaffolding, a common technique in component-oriented system design, missing components are "stubbed out" with relatively trivial placeholder components that have limited functionality.
|
From page 113... ...
In digital government, this approach could be used, for example, to experiment with the use by census takers of low-cost wireless handheld devices (now emerging in the marketplace) , with speech interfaces for use in crisis management, or with very-high-performance network links available in rapidly deployed field settings for crisis management.
|
From page 114... ...
This challenge of sequencing the risks may best be addressed by drawing on experience in research, engineering, evaluation, and operational settings, where the full range of risk issues can be best identified. Questions include how the risk dimensions interact, and which risk issues can be addressed in parallel and which must be done sequentially.
|
From page 115... ...
. · Identify the principal risk issues at each stage and consider appropriate strategies for addressing those risks.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.