Re-engineering the United States Marine Corps Special Education Program (SEP)
By: Arthur W. Bornschein, Michael Jernigan
Contributors: Jernigan, Michael
Publisher: Naval Postgraduate School; Available from National Technical Information Service
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Monterey, Calif; Springfield, Va
Language: eng
Number of pages: 184
Description: Within the United States Marine Corps, there exist billets (jobs) that require specialized graduate  education.   Department of Defense agencies submit requests to add billets to their organizational structure.   Marine Corps Orders require for every billet added another must be removed elsewhere to balance manpower requirements. Additionally, continuing validation of the billets is required to ensure compliance with Secretary of Defense criteria.  Problems in the key function, billet validation, include inflexible, inefficient, and ineffective processes, and nebulous validation criteria. We address these problems by  developing  a centralized decision support system to be used in a distributed collaborative setting. The  objectives of the Special Education Program (SEP) Billet Validation System are to allow SEP billet holders and commands to evaluate and justify existing SEP billets, to assist Military Occupational  Specialty Sponsors in identifying manpower reductions, and to validate the graduate education      requirement for existing SEP billets. Methods from Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) (specifically      Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)) are used to      formalize Secretary of Defense requirements  and quantify relative ratings of billets. The system employs a Web Browser front-end application to allow the administrative review process to be performed in a parallel manner.
Notes: "March 1998."

Thesis advisor(s): Hemant Bhargava, Suresh Sridhar, Tim Phillips.

Thesis (M.S. in Information Technology Management) Naval Postgraduate School, March 1998.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 179-182).

"Approved for public release, distribution unlimited"--Cover.

Also available online.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat reader.

US Marine Corps (USMC) authors.

dk/dk cc:9116 6/25/98.