Enhancing decision knowledge by developing a quantitative framework for holistic exploratory acquisition policy analysis

Abstract

An acquisition policy's diverse stakeholders may have heterogeneous needs. Furthermore, stakeholders may be unsure of their preferences due to a highly qualitative analysis of alternatives in the early stages of the acquisition policy development process. Lacking system knowledge and evidence, stakeholders may push back policy priorities or delay decisions. In such cases, it is necessary to increase stakeholders’ knowledge about the acquisition policy options’ impacts. This study proposes a systematic and quantitative framework development process and outlines a holistic exploratory policy analysis. Stakeholders’ needs are systematically identified and measurement areas and elements are derived from those needs. Evaluation methods are then created through a sensible quantification process to measure the impact of introducing each alternative. The framework provides information on the effects of various policy options, an analysis of each alternative's most crucial policy option, and other valuable analysis results. Finally, we present a case study to illustrate the development process and application of the framework when introducing a new military training system such as Live, Virtual, and Constructive synthetic training systems.

Framework Development for Efficient Mission-Oriented Satellite System-Level Design

“…Because stakeholders are actually the ones who either fund the budget and/or are benefactors of the mission and may be different according to the application areas, clearly identifying them and deriving their needs is important. The generic approach for the identification of stakeholders and the derivation of their needs can be found in many systems engineering studies [18,19]. Although G. Benedetti et al have recently presented stakeholder analysis to derive the mission objectives based on their needs [20], the stakeholder needs are derived from the mission objectives while considering their perspectives, roles, interests, and requests in the proposed approach.…”