Technical Report Value of Systems Engineering

This report is a follow-on from the June 2004 Air Force/Lean Aerospace Initiative Workshop on Systems Engineering for Robustness

Architecting the Firm: Coherency and Consistency in Managing the Enterprise

International audienceTraditional Enterprise Architecture (EA) practice lacks a clear and effective governance and management layer that is easily understandable and intuitive to senior decision makers with the modern organisation. This paper uses three case studies to demonstrate the relative maturity of different EA practice groups within these organisations to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of a traditional ICT management approach versus those that include EA practice in all levels and domains of management. Concepts of Coherency Management and Pervasiveness will be used to explain the idea of a next Generation of EA practice that permeates all layers of the organisation and no longer remains the domain of technologists but instead influences and informs decision-making at all levels (operational, tactical, managerial / strategic) of the organisation. Conditions of such future EA practices are also discussed

Screening for Real Options “In” an Engineering System: A Step Towards Flexible System Development

The goal of this research is to develop an analytical framework for screening for real options “in” an engineering system. Real options is defined in the finance literature as the right, but not the obligation, to take an action (e.g. deferring, expanding, contracting, or abandoning) at a predetermined cost and for a predetermined time. These are called "real options" because they pertain to physical or tangible assets, such as equipment, rather than financial instruments. Real options improve a system’s capability of undergoing classes of changes with relative ease. This property is often called “flexibility.” Recently, the DoD has emphasized the need to develop flexible system in order to improve operational, technical, and programmatic effectiveness. The aim of this research is to apply real options thinking to weapon acquisitions in order to promote the ability of weapon system programs to deftly avoid downside consequences or exploit upside opportunities

An exploratory case study on reusing architecture decisions in software-intensive system projects

Reusing architecture decisions from previous projects promises to support architects when taking decisions. However, little is known about the state of art of decision-reuse and the benefits and challenges associated with reusing decisions. Therefore, we study how software architects reuse architecture decisions, the stakeholders and their concerns related to decision-reuse, and how architects perceive the ideal future state of decision-reuse. We conducted a qualitative explorative case study in the software-intensive systems industry. The study has shown that architects frequently reuse decisions but are confined to decisions they already know or have heard about. The results also suggest that architects reuse decisions in an ad-hoc manner. Moreover this study presents a conceptual model of decision-reuse and lists stakeholder concerns with regards to decision-reuse. The results of this study indicate that improving the documentation and discoverability of decisions holds a large potential to increase reuse of decisions and that decision documentation is not only important for system understanding or in the context of architecture reviews but also to support architects in upcoming projects

The influence of the concept of capability-based management on the development of the systems engineering discipline

This paper explores the implications of a capability-based conceptual approach on the development of the systems engineering (SE) discipline. It deals with the identification of some potential limits and gaps of traditional SE approaches and demonstrates the need for new and innovative developments which support the concept of capability based engineering, especially as applied in the military domain and networking environments. The innovative approaches include partnership for capability planning and service descriptions for capability representations. The paper also presents a very brief assessment of the state-of-the-art of cognate domains such as capability based planning alongside requirements engineering and management, and considers the extent to which they address capability based concepts. The related concepts of system of systems (SoS) and the endeavour to extend SE to SoS are necessarily addressed