NASA Office of the Chief Information Officer
NASA Headquarters
300 E Street, SW
Washington, D.C. 20546
June 10, 2017
To:Robert Lightfoot, Acting NASA Administrator
From: Renee P. Wynn, NASA CIO
Subject: NASA IT governance – the Foundational-IRM Strategic Plan; leadership-level implementation, and an outline change management plan

This final report discusses leadership-level implementation of the revised Information Resources Management Strategic Plan (IRMSP) presented last week. Focus will be on the leadership ‘level’, i.e. Federal team brought in to execute the new strategic plan. As will be discussed, because of the circumstances of the problem of NASA’s IT governance, almost every other pertinent leadership level will have to interact with the new strategic plan in largely similar ways. Section 1 discusses in detail the justification for the Federal team’s makeup, mandate, and likely organizational and leadership approaches; some of this discussion will be informed by the 3D leadership model—of perception, resilience, and organizational progress—presented six weeks ago. Section 2 outlines as far as possible a change management plan; as will be seen, there are significant reasons for why a change management plan, in these circumstances and at this stage, must necessarily be a severely limited document.

1.Foundational Strategy and the ‘level’ of the FIRMSP Operational Team
The strategic plan proposed last week consisted in, first, a ‘meta’ strategic plan. That is, as depicted in Fig. 1, and based on an edifice of support established by the second, third, and fourth reports, an ‘abrupt’ shift—in place of the ostensibly evolutionary approach advocated by prior NASA CIOs—was proposed in order to aggressively address NASA IT’s governance problems. The meta component of the strategy proposed a temporary sidelining of the current Strategic Plan for NASA IT, the IRMSP. Instead, a new Foundational-IRMSP (FIRMSP) would comprise a much more focused approach, would be governed and directed not by the OCIO but by an extra-NASA Federal team, and would cover a 2-3 year period. The FIRMSP is solely concerned with ensuring that all of NASA IT is mandated to adopt and adhere to fundamental standards of IT governance and operations, in keeping with Federal standards. The FIRMSP

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