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 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.