Most technology evaluations start with the wrong question: “What’s the best tech out there?
A better question is: What is the right tech for my mission?
A technically impressive tool that can’t integrate with your physical and organizational infrastructure and mission will fail. Similarly, a powerful platform that your team fails to see operational utility in, will be under used, or worse: fail to meet expectations on mission.
Root cause: failure of your evaluation methodology. Does it ask all the mission critical questions? Does it provide qualitative and quantitative scoring? Does it account for your risk tolerance? Consider a task saturated operator? Unique mission profile?, Environmental constraints? Weight, volume, ruggedness, water resilience, battery life, temperature envelope? These questions, and 30 more.
Mission dictates the tech fit. Not the glossy slick.
RMAT, our Risk vs. Merit Assessment of Technology methodology is born of years of RDT&E for Special Operations capability development.
This truth is battlefield proven: Getting the “right tech” matters more that getting the “best tech.”
RMAT starts with a mission filtered market survey of technologies that are worth your time to even consider. Then you are able to evaluate each candidate across four critical dimensions and more than 30 mission tailored and weighted subfactors. When applied across multiple candidates:
– Key differentiators become clear.
– Mission capability stands in contrast with the glossy slick.
– Unrealized mission enhancing opportunities become apparent.
– Risks are characterized and considered against their potential for operational mitigations.
– Data driven characterization allows you to make the right choice for your missions.
Or just as important: Choose not to choose. Instead provide mission critical feedback to the vendor for a tight fit solution in the next roll out.
RMAT in a nutshell:
Technical Risk. Will the tech actually function in your environment: mission profile, security posture, operator constraints, tech maturity, integration readiness, deployment modality, and more.
Programmatic Risk. Stress-tests whether the tech candidate can be acquired and sustained: vendor track record, timeline realism if modifications or further development is needed, lifecycle costs, technical complexity: All weighed and scored to paint a clear picture of investment risk.
Severity of Need. How critical is this capability is to the mission? How precisely does the technology addresses the need? When the choices are limited in consideration of you mission timeline, sometimes you can wait for perfect. Sometimes you can’t.
Operational Merit. In the hands of the operator, what is the exact utility in terms of practical real-world use? Does it meet the mission dictated performance specs? Is it suitability for the mission from the perspective of the operator? Will it actually get used? Or is it simply displacing more important kit? This is not just a feature list on a slick.
Together these four dimensions consider a complete array of more than 30 mission tailored and operator weighted subfactors to produce a documented, defensible recommendation. A straightforward answer:
Go.
No-Go.
Or Mitigate Risks and Go, once the detailed RMAT provided mitigations are accomplished.
Because getting the “right tech” matters more than getting the “best tech.”
If you are looking for the right tech, give us a call.
