Knowledge Advantage Awards

MITRE has a longstanding tradition of knowledge sharing and collaboration as part of its corporate culture. From 2001-2015, MITRE ran a formal KM Awards program as a means to encourage the staff to share knowledge and collaborate across centers.

The challenge of leveraging and managing our enterprise knowledge and capabilities is no less important today than it was when the awards program was first established. MITRE’s continued growth in external engagements, systems engineering and integration, public-private partnerships, and community building places even more emphasis on the need for innovations in our knowledge creation and sharing strategies.

MITRE’s commitment to being a leader in this space was acknowledged with the corporation’s recent receipt of our third Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise Award for our knowledge-driven enterprise activities.

The Knowledge Advantage (KA) Program, established in 2016, encourages employees to remain engaged and informed about innovative techniques for bringing MITRE’s knowledge advantage to our work and to our sponsors’ work programs. The emphasis of this program shifts from an awards-based approach to one that honors idea-sharing within an annual showcase.

MITRE recognized the following six projects from across MITRE in the Knowledge Advantage Project Showcase, hosted in McLean, VA, and Bedford, MA, in May 2016.

Project: Cross-Cutting Approach to Framework Development for Active Cyber Defense

Team: Kristin Heckman, Frank Stech, Alex Tsow, Roshan Thomas (won 2016) PRA Knowledge Advantage Award

Project Description: Your first of its kind framework for Active Cyber Defense advances the state-of-the-practice in Computer Network Defense by bridging a critical knowledge gap between cyber security and classical denial and deception theory. We commend the extent of your outreach and collaboration across disparate disciplines in developing an innovative framework for Active Cyber Defense and publishing the first scholarly book on this critical subject. The book will broaden and deepen the dialogue in cyber-D&D research, educate the next generation of cybersecurity professionals, and show that cyber D&D is an effective capability in active cyber defense.

Project: FAA Partnership and Advanced Weather Display Improves Airport Safety

Team: Keith Campbell, Kurt Etterer

Project Description: The Airport Daily/Monthly Overview Tool transforms various sources of raw meteorological measurements into meaningful visualizations. By leveraging MITRE’s operational knowledge and broad partnerships across FAA stakeholders, MITRE developed a superior tool for weather safety analysts at the FAA and airports around the world. The CAASD team turned hard-to-decipher data into knowledge for better decision making and critical incident analysis. By bringing the FAA the knowledge advantage, you have improved flight safety for all of us!

Project: Cross-Agency Workgroup Adds Transparency to Post-Acute Care Settings

Team: Waymond Culbreth, Beth Halley, Chris Shamloo, Cindy Wear

Project Description: Coordination of patient care, smarter spending, and improved patient outcomes require systems to support standardized information capture, use, and exchange. MITRE’s KM work for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Studies (CMS) enabled standardization and interoperability for cross-environment quality comparison of patient-centered outcomes. MITRE facilitated a cross-agency workgroup, led development and implementation of a governance model, and provided technical leadership. This work will increase transparency of the quality of patient care delivered and can assist in the transformation of healthcare delivery for the Post-Acute Care population. Yearly, the work will impact over 32,000 post-acute care providers.

Project: Bringing the MITRE Knowledge Advantage to the Synthetic Training Environments

Team: Brian Parrish, Bruce Gorski

Project Description: This MITRE team orchestrated broad partnership engagement across the highest levels of the Army and Joint communities, and over 125 industry and academia organizations to define and develop the Synthetic Training Environment. The synthetic training environment (STE) is the Army’s next generation cloud-based training environment built around a single comprehensive terrain data set using common and customizable authoritative data. It will provide point of need training via real-world Mission Command systems and will be compliant with the Common Operating Environment (COE). The STE will support all levels of command and staff training to include Joint and Multinational Unified Action Partners, bringing our sponsor the knowledge advantage!

Project: Collaborative Spaces for a Contemporary Knowledge Workforce

Team: Doug Phair, Lorin Petersen, Marc Cannava, John Hall, Nate Jacobs

Project Description: You embarked on a multi-year effort to study the process of collaborative knowledge creation, and to modernize and extend what was possible through the use of novel collaboration technologies. This understanding and the supporting technologies provided better face-to-face knowledge capture, awareness of shared spaces, and better support and space design for brainstorming, team work, and the mobile workforce. You also extended these important processes across virtual teams and leveraged modern workspace design principles. Your work influenced the design of MITRE’s physical spaces such as MITRE 4, to meet the collaboration needs of a changing work environment, giving MITRE project teams the knowledge advantage.

Project: HLearn Prepares MITRE Staff for Surge in Healthcare Work

Team: Linda Fischetti, Lisa Tutterow, Steve Scott, John Shottes Jr, Cynthia Taylor Small, Marianne Smith, Lara Van Nostrand, Phil Trudeau, Stacey Zlotnick

Project Description: To meet the growing demand for MITRE technical staff in the new work program areas of Healthcare, you brought together a MITRE-wide Steering Committee (SC) representing Health Portfolios & Program Divisions, Tech Centers, and the MITRE Institute (MI). The goal of this cross-organizational initiative was to create training materials and a curriculum to grow a pipeline of MITRE staff trained in fundamental Health domain concepts, and ready to support projects. In 6 months, 102 pipeline staff have completed 2 or more courses teaching fundamental concepts in the Health domain. Results showed that the training helped staff understand the Health domain, prepared them to interview for Health projects, ramp up more quickly on Health projects, and staff the Health project work program, giving our sponsors the knowledge advantage.

Revisiting a Former President’s Knowledge Management Achievement Award Winner

Project: Continuing to Build a Robust Cost Estimation Community on a Social Media Platform

Team: Ruth Dorr, Dan Harper

Project Description: This project won in 2013 for their innovative use of social media to improve knowledge sharing within the cost-estimation community. They had promoted the capabilities of a powerful social networking platform to make it easy for diverse stakeholders to reuse and contribute to a repository of cost estimation knowledge products, exhibiting exceptional community leadership.

Checking back in in 2016, the community is robust and going strong with now over 300 members and nearly 1000 artifacts shared within the community. The community has quickly grown into an authoritative source for cost facts. They established a strategic partnership with International Cost Estimating and Analysis Association (ICEAA) and gained the endorsement from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) leadership. As the capability matures into an institutionalized resource, the team developed more formal governance guidelines. Best community building practices have included presenting about the community at technical conferences, good community stewardship and advocating for the capability. The Cost Facts team works tirelessly at outreach across government, academia, and industry to promote the benefits of the Cost Facts handshake community.

Award winners from previous years follow.

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