NASA Office of the Chief Information Officer
NASA Headquarters
300 E Street, SW
Washington, D.C. 20546
June 3, 2017
To: Robert Lightfoot, Acting NASA Administrator
From: Renee P. Wynn, NASA CIO
Subject: NASA IT governance â€“ a new IRM Strategic Plan

Overview
In keeping with the â€˜historical approachâ€™ adopted throughout these reports, this proposal of a new Strategic Plan for NASA IT uses as its starting point former CIO Larry Sweetâ€™s 2014 Information Resources Management Strategic Plan (IRMSP). This report argues that the 2014 IRMSP, while informative, is representative of the chief driver for NASA ITâ€™s governance problems: the damaging effects of NASAâ€™s path dependence on its IT infrastructure, policies, and implementation, of which there is no better example than the failure of the Agency to assume even the most elementary of competent IT security postures. The strategic counterproposal presented here embodies an effort to mitigate the effects of path dependence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the resulting plan is austere but clear-eyed and unapologetically focused on, finally, fixing the most important of NASA ITâ€™s problems.
Strategy and the effects of path dependence
Fig. 1 presents the OCIOâ€™s 2014 IRMSP in the broader context of the Agency Strategic Plan, within the more immediate context of strategy for IT across the federal government, and given the Agencyâ€™s IT vision, mission, principles, and business and stakeholder analyses. The IRMSP then leads to â€˜subâ€™ plans for how enterprise investments and the Agencyâ€™s IT workforce will execute strategic goals. And then, finally, there are the annual tactical goals

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