The Department of Defense, like other government agencies and indeed
the global business community, faces increasingly complex challenges
that cannot be met by stand-alone 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-of-systems, 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." C4ISR1 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.
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