The Knowledge Application and Utilization Framework Applied to Defense COTS: A Research Synthesis for Outsourced Innovation

Purpose -- Militaries of developing nations face increasing budget pressures, high operations tempo, a blitzing pace of technology, and adversaries that often meet or beat government capabilities using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. The adoption of COTS products into defense acquisitions has been offered to help meet these challenges by essentially outsourcing new product development and innovation. This research summarizes extant research to develop a framework for managing the innovative and knowledge flows. Design/Methodology/Approach – A literature review of 62 sources was conducted with the objectives of identifying antecedents (barriers and facilitators) and consequences of COTS adoption. Findings – The DoD COTS literature predominantly consists of industry case studies, and there’s a strong need for further academically rigorous study. Extant rigorous research implicates the importance of the role of knowledge management to government innovative thinking that relies heavily on commercial suppliers. Research Limitations/Implications – Extant academically rigorous studies tend to depend on measures derived from work in information systems research, relying on user satisfaction as the outcome. Our findings indicate that user satisfaction has no relationship to COTS success; technically complex governmental purchases may be too distant from users or may have socio-economic goals that supersede user satisfaction. The knowledge acquisition and utilization framework worked well to explain the innovative process in COTS. Practical Implications – Where past research in the commercial context found technological knowledge to outweigh market knowledge in terms of importance, our research found the opposite. Managers either in government or marketing to government should be aware of the importance of market knowledge for defense COTS innovation, especially for commercial companies that work as system integrators. Originality/Value – From the literature emerged a framework of COTS product usage and a scale to measure COTS product appropriateness that should help to guide COTS product adoption decisions and to help manage COTS product implementations ex post

Investigating the Feasibility of Open Development of Operations Support Solutions

The telecommunications Operations Support Systems supply chain must address many stakeholders: R&D, Product and Requirements Management, Purchasing, Systems Integration, Systems Administration and Users. While the management of next generation networks and services poses significant technical challenges, the present supply chain, market configuration, and business practices of the OSS community are an obstacle to rapid innovation. Forums for open development could potentially provide a medium to shorten this supply chain for the deployment of workable systems. This paper discusses the potential benefits and barriers to the open development of OSS for the telecommunications industry. It proposes the use of action research to execute a feasibility study into the open development of OSS software solutions within an industry wide Open OSS project

Construction of a taxonomy for requirements engineering commercial-off-the-shelf components

This article presents a procedure for constructing a taxonomy of COTS products in the field of Requirements Engineering (RE). The taxonomy and the obtained information reach transcendental benefits to the selection of systems and tools that aid to RE-related actors to simplify and facilitate their work. This taxonomy is performed by means of a goal-oriented methodology inspired in GBRAM (Goal-Based Requirements Analysis Method), called GBTCM (Goal-Based Taxonomy Construction Method), that provides a guide to analyze sources of information and modeling requirements and domains, as well as gathering and organizing the knowledge in any segment of the COTS market. GBTCM claims to promote the use of standards and the reuse of requirements in order to support different processes of selection and integration of components.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A framework for the definition of metrics for actor-dependency models

Actor-dependency models are a formalism aimed at providing intentional descriptions of processes as a network of dependency relationships among actors. This kind of models is currently widely used in the early phase of requirements engineering as well as in other contexts such as organizational analysis and business process reengineering. In this paper, we are interested in the definition of a framework for the formulation of metrics over these models. These metrics are used to analyse the models with respect to some properties that are interesting for the system being modelled, such as security, efficiency or accuracy. The metrics are defined in terms of the actors and dependencies of the model. We distinguish three different kinds of metrics that are formally defined, and then we apply the framework at two different layers of a meeting scheduler system.Postprint (published version

Selection of third party software in Off-The-Shelf-based software development: an interview study with industrial practitioners

The success of software development using third party components highly depends on the ability to select a suitable component for the intended application. The evidence shows that there is limited knowledge about current industrial OTS selection practices. As a result, there is often a gap between theory and practice, and the proposed methods for supporting selection are rarely adopted in the industrial practice. This paper's goal is to investigate the actual industrial practice of component selection in order to provide an initial empirical basis that allows the reconciliation of research and industrial endeavors. The study consisted of semi-structured interviews with 23 employees from 20 different software-intensive companies that mostly develop web information system applications. It provides qualitative information that help to further understand these practices, and emphasize some aspects that have been overlooked by researchers. For instance, although the literature claims that component repositories are important for locating reusable components; these are hardly used in industrial practice. Instead, other resources that have not received considerable attention are used with this aim. Practices and potential market niches for software-intensive companies have been also identified. The results are valuable from both the research and the industrial perspectives as they provide a basis for formulating well-substantiated hypotheses and more effective improvement strategies.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Software acquisition: a business strategy analysis

The paper argues that there are new insights to be gained from a strategic analysis of requirements engineering. The paper is motivated by a simple question: what does it take to be a world class software acquirer? The question has relevance for requirements engineers because for many organisations market pressures mean that software is commonly acquired rather than developed from scratch. The paper builds on the work of C. H. Fine (1998) who suggests that product, process and supply chain should be designed together, i.e., 3D concurrent engineering. Using a number of reference theories, it proposes a systematic way of carrying out 3D concurrent engineering. The paper concludes that the critical activity in supply chain design is the design of the distribution of skills and the nature of contract

Safety Engineering with COTS components

Safety-critical systems are becoming more widespread, complex and reliant on software. Increasingly they are engineered through Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) (Commercial Off The Shelf) components to alleviate the spiralling costs and development time, often in the context of complex supply chains. A parallel increased concern for safety has resulted in a variety of safety standards, with a growing consensus that a safety life cycle is needed which is fully integrated with the design and development life cycle, to ensure that safety has appropriate influence on the design decisions as system development progresses. In this article we explore the application of an integrated approach to safety engineering in which assurance drives the engineering process. The paper re- ports on the outcome of a case study on a live industrial project with a view to evaluate: its suitability for application in a real-world safety engineering setting; its benefits and limitations in counteracting some of the difficulties of safety en- gineering with COTS components across supply chains; and, its effectiveness in generating evidence which can contribute directly to the construction of safety cases

A framework for selecting workflow tools in the context of composite information systems

When an organization faces the need of integrating some workflow-related activities in its information system, it becomes necessary to have at hand some well-defined informational model to be used as a framework for determining the selection criteria onto which the requirements of the organization can be mapped. Some proposals exist that provide such a framework, remarkably the WfMC reference model, but they are designed to be appl icable when workflow tools are selected independently from other software, and departing from a set of well-known requirements. Often this is not the case: workflow facilities are needed as a part of the procurement of a larger, composite information syste m and therefore the general goals of the system have to be analyzed, assigned to its individual components and further detailed. We propose in this paper the MULTSEC method in charge of analyzing the initial goals of the system, determining the types of components that form the system architecture, building quality models for each type and then mapping the goals into detailed requirements which can be measured using quality criteria. We develop in some detail the quality model (compliant with the ISO/IEC 9126-1 quality standard) for the workflow type of tools; we show how the quality model can be used to refine and clarify the requirements in order to guarantee a highly reliable selection result; and we use it to evaluate two particular workflow solutions a- ailable in the market (kept anonymous in the paper). We develop our proposal using a particular selection experience we have recently been involved in, namely the procurement of a document management subsystem to be integrated in an academic data management information system for our university.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft