Services Provided

Business process analysis

Requirements gathering and prioritization

Business process reengineering

Maturity assessment

Change management

Enterprise architecture development

Governance process improvement

Stakeholder outreach and communication

The Challenge

The Aerospace Corporation is a non-profit corporation operating as a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) providing R&D and technical guidance on all aspects of space missions to military, civil, and commercial customers.

Aerospace's IT Department was facing significant cuts to its annual O&M budget to fund upgrades to its campus in Chantilly, Virginia. As a result, the CIO faced new challenges in prioritizing IT investments and achieving the highest ROI possible with newly limited budgets.

Solution and Outcome

The Aerospace Corporation retained the services of a consulting firm to assess its as-is IT governance process maturity, develop a 5-year IT master plan, and establish innovative approaches to improve governance of IT investments.

Mr. Feinberg served in a lead role to assess Aerospace's current governance maturity, develop the master plan, establish new governance procedures, and prepare an enterprise architecture (EA) baseline.

As a result, the Aerospace Corporation had optimized governance processes in place, based on industry best practices and a refreshed EA baseline, to manage and prioritize its investments in enterprise-class IT solutions supporting the Aerospace mission.

Project Activities and Deliverables

• Facilitated requirements workshops with the Aerospace Corporation Chief Information Officer (CIO), corporate Strategic Planning Office and senior IT department managers to identify current IT management process capability gaps and weaknesses and helped establish resulting recommendations.

• Assessed current IT governance maturity using the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) frameworks.

• Established a set of implementation recommendations over a 5-year planning period to enable Aerospace Corporation to improve its IT governance and management process maturity.

• Recommended improvements to governance bodies, budget prioritization and approval processes, and for an enterprise architecture (EA) baseline to improve decision-making processes.

• Presented findings and recommendations to the Aerospace Corporation CIO and Board of Directors.

• Developed an architecture baseline using The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). The architecture baseline is used as the key resource for IT governance. All proposed new IT investments must align with and support the architecture patterns and standards.