An holistic view of UK military capability development

Through Life Capability Management (TLCM) is the dominant theme of proposed changes to UK defence acquisition, but progress has been hindered by a lack of agreed interpretations for key concepts. This paper provides some clarity for Capability, Network Enabled Capability (NEC), TLCM, and Affordability and notes, in particular, the fractal nature of capability. Through stakeholder analysis and concept maps, we identify some of the major challenges associated with TLCM. These include affordability (which is the motivation for TLCM but may also be its stumbling block); the increased priority of agility, adaptability, and flexibility in capability planning; and the need for appropriate TLCM metrics. The lack of an explicit learning mechanism within the capability planning process is also a major deficiency, because TLCM relies on effective knowledge management. The changing role of industry is considered and the need for an holistic view of capability is emphasised

A systems approach for balancing internal company capability and external client demand for integrated product-service solutions

This paper offers a systems thinking approach for easing the tension between the front office (responsible for meeting client requirements) and the back office (responsible for providing necessary company capabilities) in the transformation of a product focused company to a product service provider. These parts of the company may have competing objectives and cultures that must be reconciled to ease the train of tension between them. We propose consideration of these parts as individual systems within a system of systems construct and suggest the creation of a central function as a third system, the purpose of which is to manage the interoperability between the front and back offices. The central function provides a leadership role and an integrating function for the company, the outcome of which should be firstly to act as a catalyst for changing the mindset of individuals within the organization towards the product service endeavour and, secondly, a strategic balance in terms of implementing policy in accordance with the changing external business environment. The management of this balance between the product system and the service system within the same organization is a crucial element of sustainability

Demonstrating through-life and NEC requirements for defence systems

There are two major transformations currently occurring that significantly impact acquisition and management of military systems. Network Enabled Capability (NEC) demands careful consideration of interoperability for delivered systems; new systems must be introduced such that they are interoperable with current systems and legacy systems must be managed (upgraded, modified etc.) such that interoperability is maintained and, preferably, enhanced. Eventually, NEC considerations should become ‘business as usual’, but for the time being special consideration is needed. The second transformation is the introduction of the concept of Through Life Capability Management (TLCM). Although new systems have always been planned with consideration of their maintenance etc., TLCM has a wider scope. It requires consideration not only of the individual systems’ life cycles, but of the management of the super system in which new systems will operate. The whole life costs, risks, and development must be considered by systems designers and owners. These transformations are linked; interoperability is a key requirement of TLCM. Through a concept mapping of TLCM, Yue & Henshaw (1) have shown that TLCM implies a need for new approaches (new thinking) in defence systems design and acquisition. Also TLCM requires the defence supply chain (industry) to have a changed engagement in the delivery and management of systems. This, in turn, requires changes to the industry-customer relationship, such that new approaches to collaboration are a vital ingredient necessary for adherence to TLCM principles. The NECTISE (Network Enabled Capability Through Innovative Systems Engineering: www.nectise.com) programme was a large academic-industry research programme (part sponsored by industry) to investigate the implications for systems engineering arising from NEC and TLCM considerations. The programme included ten UK universities, and industry technologists and systems engineers from land, sea, air, and C4I domains. NECTISE considered systems processes and approaches from all parts of the capability management process (planning, design, change, and realisation in military operations). A number of new tools and processes were developed and an important part of the programme was to demonstrate these in context and together. This demonstration was achieved through development of a scenario that considered the full systems acquisition and management process. By linking a set of vignettes with different timeframes it was possible to track an exemplar system through the planning to realisation and use stages. The scenario development drew heavily on the TTCP GUIDEx approach to defence experimentation; this enabled effective multi-disciplinary collaboration and integration of many different research threads. This paper will describe the scenario planning activity and outcome and illustrate the manner in which linked research outputs were integrated into a systems engineering demonstration. The importance of systems architecting, both to the demonstration and (more importantly) as a key underpinning skill for TLCM and NEC will be emphasised. The approach taken in this demonstration of research has implications for the approaches that should be taken for defence procurement decision making in a TLCM and NEC characterised acquisition environment. These are described and the implications of TLCM for decision making is also highlighted

An incremental hybridisation of heterogeneous case studies to develop an ontology for capability engineering

An analysis of perspectives for “capability engineering” has been conducted by the INCOSE UK Capability Working Group (CWG). This paper is a continuation of this study led by the CWG ontology work stream that aims to develop a single shared ontology for the concept of capability engineering to enable semantic interoperability and to support a formal and explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation. Case study material from the different domains of rail, defence and information services was used. The ontology development was executed in three phases; (1) pre-analysis, (2) ontology modelling and (3) post-analysis. The pre-analysis involved literature reviews, requirements specification, systems engineering process utilisation; and resource identification i.e. examination of the case study material. The ontology modelling phase comprised information extraction and classification in addition to modelling and code representation using a mark-up tool, MS Excel and Protégé. The post-analysis involved validation workshops through using expert focus groups

Systems of systems engineering thesaurus approach: from concept to realisation

The developing discipline of Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) is gaining attention in an increasingly broad range of domains; however, each domain comes with its own set of terms and concepts so that there may be confusion between different domains ostensibly engaged in similar challenges. SoSE is faced with concept multiplicity (one term, more than one concept) and term multiplicity (one concept, more than one term). It is unrealistic to expect long-established domains to simply change ontology to match with other domains, but a means of recognising related concepts and terms across domains and across industrial sectors will enable more rapid progress to be made in the development of SoSE. The approach taken to generating a thesaurus, through which such relationships can be documented, is presented. The approach is essentially consultative among SoSE experts and the current version of the thesaurus is available online. A combination of problem statement definition and logical decomposition has been used; the method is described and application is illustrated using well-known term

Assessment of open architectures within defence procurement issue 1: systems of systems approach community forum working group 1 - open systems and architectures.

Flexibility is a crucial requirement for the systems acquired by MoD. Operational flexibility is required to enable agile mission groups to configure and reconfigure available assets to meet rapidly changing operational requirements. Technical flexibility is required to enable more rapid and effective upgrade of systems, especially in terms of technology insertion. Commercial flexibility is required to achieve value and innovation in procurement. Open systems has been espoused in a number of Government papers as an enabler of this required flexibility. An Open System is one that implements sufficient open specifications or standards for interfaces, services, and supporting formats, to enable properly engineered components to be ported with minimal changes across a wide range of systems from one or more suppliers. An Open (Systems) Architecture applies to a system in which the architecture is published in sufficient detail to enable change and subsequent evolution through the introduction or replacement of modules and/or components from any supplier

Understanding influences on decision making: Combining cultural attributes with role profiles to evaluate

A key issue for today’s decision support tools is the increasing complexity of the environment in which industries and their supply chains operate. These entities can be classified as Enterprise Systems and Systems of Systems. The aim of this paper is to describe the development of an integrated modelling approach that could deliver greater understanding of the influences associated with the decision making process at the Enterprise System level by taking into account cultural aspects and role profiles of key stakeholders