A - In July of 1958, MITRE was founded as a private, not-for-profit corporation to provide engineering and technical services to the federal government. In doing so, it fulfilled a request by Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas for a specialized services group to provide the system engineering and ongoing support for the massive, multi-billion dollar, continental air defense system called SAGE. SAGE, or Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, was developed for the United States Air Force from 1950 to 1957 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Digital Computer Laboratory, the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. MITRE was incorporated one month following the installation of the first of 23 national SAGE centers at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey. MITRE first settled in the Boston area.
Stakeholder groups: senior management, HR managers, facility and regional directors, it directors and employees.
MITRE systems engineers must build relationships with the stakeholders throughout the transformation process [3]. They should employ a combination of one-on-one interviews, focus groups, and surveys to rapidly establish rapport and create an environment that contributes to the stakeholders being open and honest while describing challenging situations.
Rather than just fire off one question after the next, it is important to engage stakeholders in dialogue and exhibit interest in their opinions and perspectives. Ask follow-up questions to solicit specific examples and understand how stakeholders developed their opinions and perceptions. The interview protocol should include open-ended and Likert-scaled questions. Liker scales are a type of survey response format where survey respondents are asked to indicate their level of agreement/interest on a continuum (e.g., from strongly agree to strongly