In Stage 2: Building the Investment Foundation, basic selection capabilities are being driven by the development of project selection criteria, including benefit and risk criteria, and an awareness of organizational priorities when identifying projects for funding (GAO 2004, p. 11).

The ability to select projects based on well informed decisions is a governmentwide prerequisite for improving interoperability. Such well informed decisions require accurate and detailed information. The information necessary to guide these investments decisions is generated through two processes. The first is the creation of a business case for the project and the second is an agreed upon and standardized process for reviewing business cases and making decisions on which ones to fund. An example of these processes can be found in Stage 2 of the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) IT Investment Management Framework (ITIM): “Building the Investment Foundation.” In the GAO model, this capability is improved upon in subsequent stages, but Stage 2 is the baseline requirement. The importance of these types of capabilities is also supported in some of the other capability maturity models in their discussions of “business and technical architectures” and “enterprise architecture.” U.S. and European models show increased incorporation of architecture approaches to address aligning government missions, strategic plans, goals, and processes with investments in technology (Guijarro 2007; GAO 2004; Athena 2004, Pardo et al 2005, Cresswell et al 2006).

Figure 1 below illustrates a business case development and evaluation process from the Center for Technology in Government’s Making Smart IT Choices: Understanding Value and Risk in Government IT Investments. Smart IT was developed specifically for those types of government investments that involve organizations working in new ways and with new partners.

Figure 1. The Analysis and Evaluation Process (Dawes et al 2005)

In addition, to making well-informed decisions about which initiatives to invest in, government professionals must be trained in managing large, complex, and multi-agency and multi-sector projects. Recent research indicates that success in government interoperability initiatives can be attributed in part to the management of these initiatives by people with specialized project management skills specific to the network context. These individuals proved capable of working in the “seams” that hold multi-agency collaborations together (Cook et al 2004, p. 31).

Identify & test solutions
This phase makes substantial use of the experiences of other government organizations, other governments, and even private sector companies who have attempted to achieve similar goals. It leads to the identification of alternative solutions and offers ways to test them in low-cost, low-risk ways. Tools to facilitate this process do not include actual IT systems design or implementation but rather focus on best and current practice research, technology awareness reviews, benchmarking, environmental scanning, and prototyping. (Dawes et al 2005, p. 25).