The complex problems that the U.S and world face in national security, homeland security, intelligence, and other areas of national significance require new approaches built on applied systems thinking. The research being conducted at the Applied Systems Thinking (ASysT) Institute is creating those new approaches through a close partnership with a diverse set of government and industry partners.  ASysT Institute researchers bring a novel perspective to understanding and improving large-scale enterprises by integrating research in systems thinking, systems engineering, systems architecting, enterprise management, and other related disciplines.

Although a broad research agenda is planned, the current focus will address these questions:
 

• Enterprise Resilience: What is a resilient enterprise? What are good examples of resilient enterprises? What factors contribute to enterprise resilience and how should resilience be assessed and measured? How does one architect and design a resilient enterprise? Are there architectural patterns for resilience? How does resilience interact with agility, security, and other important attributes of a modern complex enterprise? For example, are there specific security policies or policy implementations that make resilience harder or easier? What safeguards, policies, and mechanisms are needed to ensure enterprise resilience does not degrade over time?
• Governance models for complex distributed enterprises: What governance models exist, what are their essential properties, and which ones are having the most success? How does one model the effectiveness and efficiency of enterprise governance models? Can new, distributed governance models be developed for the more effective operation of the complex human-factors systems of today? How does one assess enterprise entropy and the impact of governance models on that entropy? Which governance models improve enterprise agility, resilience, and security? Can that improvement be quantified? How does one characterize and resolve clashes in culture, security policy, agility, resilience, and other properties of the several units of a distributed enterprise?
• New systems thinking methods: Current methods and their automation are not enough to fully address the questions listed above and to resolve similar questions, especially to address the impact of fundamental changes as might occur when two organizations merge, a company launches a major new product, or an enterprise expands its mission. Current systems thinking methods, such as causal loops, are imprecise and do not allow for a deep understanding of the effects of changing key enterprise characteristics, such as environment, policy, people, culture, products, mission, and infrastructure. What new methods will allow an enterprise to think clearly, precisely, and quantitatively about the impact of such changes? What tooling will make those new methods practical to use on large-scale enterprises?