Building Enterprise Transition Plans Through the Development of Collapsing Design Structure Matrices

The United States Air Force (USAF), like many other large enterprises, has evolved over time, expanded its capabilities and has developed focused, yet often redundant, operational silos, functions and information systems (IS). Recent failures in enterprise integration efforts herald a need for a new method that can account for the challenges presented by decades of increases in enterprise complexity, redundancy and Operations and Maintenance (O&M) costs. Product or system-level research has dominated the study of traditional Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) with minimal coverage on enterprise-level issues. This research proposes a new method of collapsing DSMs (C-DSMs) to illustrate and mitigate the problem of enterprise IS redundancy while developing a systems integration plan. Through the use of iterative user constraints and controls, the C-DSM method employs an algorithmic and unbiased approach that automates the creation of a systems integration plan that provides not only a roadmap for complexity reduction, but also cost estimates for milestone evaluation. Inspired by a recent large IS integration program, an example C-DSM of 100 interrelated legacy systems was created. The C-DSM method indicates that if a slow path to integration is selected then cost savings are estimated to surpass integration costs after several iterations