The Making of a Government LSI—From Warfare Capability to Operational System

As the government continues to evolve and implement Lead System Integrator (LSI) acquisition strategies, they have started to define numerous program initiatives that employ more integrated engineering and management processes and techniques. These initiatives are developing varying acquisition approaches that define (1) mission-level capability oriented architectures, (2) system-of-system implementation strategies, (3) program of record transition strategies, and (4) system engineering and program management acquisition process transformations. This paper explores these approaches and their progression to the government LSI transformation. Navy Systems Commands have begun adding a higher level of integration into their acquisition process with the implementation of the design and definition of Integrated Warfare Capability (IWC). This concept integrates the requirements for warfare capabilities and then transitions these well-defined capabilities into programs of records (PORs). This new IWC approach will impact the current technical review process and should enable an enterpriselevel approach to the acquisition of capabilities in an interoperable system-of-systems (SoS) environment as well as the PORs that acquire those capabilities. This paper extends our previous work to discuss how the IWC leads to a POR, as well as an analysis of the various LSI processes being deployed across those programs. Additionally, we will continue to explore how the creation and development of the previously introduced Model Based Acquisition Framework (MBAF), a design-driven engineering process, can help support both the IWC and POR mission-driven acquisition management strategies. Background This research is a continuation of research presented at past acquisition conferences. Previously, the authors described (1) the roles and attributes of the Lead System Integrator (LSI; Montgomery et al., 2012) and (2) the concept of how System Definition-Enabled Acquisition (SDEA) can support the systems engineering imperatives of acquisition of complex systems (Montgomery et al., 2013) and the DoD LSI Transformation—Creating a Model Based Acquisition Framework (MBAF) (Carlson &