Engineering Enterprise Systems: Challenges and Prospects

The Department of Defense, like other government agencies and indeed the global business community, faces increasingly complex challenges that cannot be met by standalone systems. This has led to growing reliance on increasingly interoperable and interdependent systems that combine multiple organizational and functional capabilities to achieve an overarching mission. This is the motivation for developing systems-ofsystems, enterprise systems, and even extended enterprise systems. We call these “mega-systems” and define them as “large-scale, potentially complex systems that cross traditional boundaries to provide a level of functionality not achieved by their component elements.” C4ISR systems, particularly ones that cross organization, functional, service, and coalition boundaries, are examples of such mega-systems. This paper focuses on the engineering of this class of systems: a process that demands consideration of increasing program scale, the rapid pace of change of the underlying technologies, the complexity of system interactions, and, perhaps most important, shared ownership and control of the mega-system. We hypothesize that engineering these mega-systems is inherently different from engineering large-scale but essentially well-bounded monolithic systems. We present the results of two case studies, one from the DoD and the other from the commercial domain. We introduce a complexity model and apply it to the case studies. The model highlights four critical contextual dimensions that influence the acquisition and engineering of systems, systems of systems, and enterprise systems: the strategic context, the implementation context, the stakeholder context, and the system context. The model is offered both as a diagnostic tool to map the particular system context and as a situational model to identify applicable strategies and practices. On the basis of these insights, we propose a collaborative, iterative approach to engineering mega-systems that emphasizes experimentation over rigorous requirements definition and continuous evolution over imposition of a “grand design”.