An Analysis of Major Acquisition Reforms through Text Mining and Grounded Theory Design

Cost growth is an established phenomenon within Defense Acquisition that the US Government has attempted to abolish for decades through seemingly endless cycles of reform. Dozens of experts and senior leaders within the acquisition community have published their notions on the reasons for cost growth, nevertheless, legislation has yet to eradicate this presumed conundrum. For this reason, this research is aimed at identifying existing trends within past major Defense Acquisition Reform legislation, as well as in a compendium of views from leaders within the Defense Acquisition community on the efficacy of acquisition reform, to determine the possible disconnect. To accomplish this goal, this research takes a qualitative approach, utilizing various Text Mining methodologies (word frequency, word relationships, term frequency-inverse document frequency, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling), along with Grounded Theory Design, to analyze the major reforms and expert views. The results of this research corroborate the current literature’s claim that past Defense Acquisition reforms have not been able to sufficiently address the root causes of cost growth, and identifies six potential root causes of cost growth: Strategy, the Industrial Base, Risk Management, the Requirements and Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) Processes, the Workforce, and Cost Estimates and the Planning, Programming, Budget, and Execution (PPBE) Process

Text Mining Analysis of Acquisition Reforms and Expert Views

Legislation, in the form of acquisition reforms, is historically enacted to address perceived cost, schedule, and performance problems in the defense acquisition system. Text mining is utilized to examine five major reforms and a compendium of views from 32 acquisition experts to identify commonalities and disconnects