Resilience of business strategy to emergent and future conditions

Abstract

Assuring future performance of systems-of-systems through advanced-technology investments is a perpetual challenge of industry and agencies. Among the complicating factors are technology innovation, escalating scales, and diversity of software and hardware applications, increasing availability and scrutiny of big data, and evolving business, environmental, and legal contexts. These factors are engaging system owner/operators to continually reprioritize these investments, even as transparent principles for investment are needed for appropriate oversight and auditing. In this paper, a branch of resilience analysis offers to address multiple layers of uncertainty that arise from technology plans around future disruptions to large-scale systems-of-systems. The paper presents a methodology to quantify and manage the disruptive influence of individual systems perspectives to the prioritization of technology investments across the system-of-systems. The methodology is demonstrated through a case study on an information technology investment portfolio of the US Department of Commerce, USA. The experience suggests how fiscal limitations, combining with several other factors, has the largest disruption to the prioritization of investments. The results furthermore describe how investments perform relative to one another and characterize where the system-of-systems might be resilient to the perspectives of constituent systems.Abbreviations: BEA: Bureau of Economic Analysis; BIS: Bureau of Industry and Security; DOC: United States Department of Commerce; FY: Fiscal Year; IT: Information Technology; MCDA: Multicriteria Decision Analysis; NOAA: National Oceaic and Atmospheric Administration; NTIA: National Telecommunications and Information Administration; USPTO: United States Patent and Trademark Office.