Stakeholder salience influence on bureaucratic program enterprise value creation

Abstract

In 2009, the Government Accountability Office reported that two-thirds of major weapon systems acquisition programs were required to report budget overruns and were almost two years behind schedule for delivery of capability to the warfighters. The Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States asked the same question: "How do we fix DOD acquisition?" The Acquisition system has been studied nearly continuously for more than forty years. Applying traditional system engineering methods have not improved performance, but developed a highly-complex bureaucracy that is viewed as inflexible, unscalable, unreliable, and (recently) unsustainable. With this seemingly intractable challenge, this work uses the synergy of integrating approaches based on engineering, management, and social sciences to develop a new framework to help understand the policy resistance of many previous unsuccessful initiatives. This research seeks to develop a dynamic enterprise engineering system framework using case study methodology to integrate three widely adopted but disparate frameworks by evaluating the influence relationships. Informed by the enterprise architecture, this new framework seeks to incorporate stakeholder salience and its dynamic influence on value creation as an endogenous factor in the context of the bureaucratic program enterprise of DOD acquisition. This work not only proposes an intermediate level theory but also provides insights for policy implications.