The Business Case for SWIM

摘要

The Global Communications Navigation and Surveillance System Phase II team is conducting an investment analysis for Systems Wide Information Management (SWIM) for the FA, under the GCNSS Phase II contract. This paper will describe both the methodology being used to evaluate the business case and strategy for SWIM as well as the strategies being considered and the most promising strategies identified to date. The business case for SWIM may seem easy to close at first glance. Certainly a system-wide approach to sharing information provides significant economies of scale to any company or institution that can achieve that standard. But the cost to move from the current information stovepipes in the FAA (indeed in any organization) to SWIM can be significant. In addition, the initial transitions to SWIM, publishing existing data through SWIM's publish-subscribe mechanisms, will result in cost only and arguably no direct benefit. Compounding the problem, the FAA has seen its budget cut in the last year. The FAA can't afford a large investment and needs to see return on its investment quickly in order to justify the investment at this time. SWIM suffers from its scope, both economically and politically: Economically, SWIM is trying to close a business case for more FAA hardware and software without imposing any direct change on FAA operations. This contradicts the logic expounded by re-engineering champions several years ago that automating processes without changing them provides little benefit. Politically, SWIM requires participating application owners to give up some of their control by adhering to SWIM standards and using SWIM infrastructure in their architecture. The GCNSS Phase II team is using decision analysis techniques and Decision Advisor software to evaluate a broad set of opportunities quickly and on a consistent basis. Decision analysis is an ideal methodology for a program such as SWIM which is still early in its conceptual design, by allowing experts to input uncertainties and highlighting the impact of those uncertainties to focus further information gathering. The paper will describe the modular approach the GCNSS Phase II team is using to evaluate a broad range of possible initial SWIM transitions and how it is leveraging decision analysis techniques to help build business cases quickly in a repeatable consistent manner.