Best Practices in Government Acquisition: A Test of the Government Accountability Office's Knowledge-Based Acquisition Theory

摘要

The U.S. Government has looked for effective ways of reducing acquisition costs and schedule overruns for decades. The task of isolating the root causes of these problems has been difficult. Consequently, the Government has not yet created effective policies to prevent cost and schedule overruns from occurring. In 1998, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) decided to address this problem. They looked to successful DoD and commercial acquisition efforts for solutions. They found that using mature technology, having complete product designs, and having production processes under control were critical to the successful development of new products. The GAO combined these concepts into a single acquisition practice that they call the Knowledge-Based Acquisition Theory (KAT). They postulate that programs that adhere to the KAT approach will experience better program outcomes than programs that do not adhere to it. The primary research question is as follows: Do defense acquisition programs that adhere to the GAO's Knowledge-Based Approach perform better than programs that do not. This thesis validates GAO's claim. While GAO's approach may not be the only way to achieve success, programs that employed their approach generally performed better. Specifically, the programs that met GAO's KAT criteria experienced a smaller variation in outcomes and appeared less likely to spiral out of control.