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Profiling Complex Systems
April 2008
Renee Stevens, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
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 and
overarching mission. This is the motivation for developing systems-of-systems, enterprise systems, and even extended enterprise
systems. This paper focuses on the engineering of this class of
systems: a process that demands consideration of increasing scale,
the rapid pace of change of the underlying technologies, the
complexity of system interactions, and, perhaps most important,
shared ownership and control. We hypothesize that engineering
these systems is inherently different from engineering large-scale
but essentially deterministic systems. Decisions about the system(s)
under development have to consider not only the technical and
programmatic dimensions but also the political, operational and
economic contexts. This paper presents a diagnostic tool for
profiling complexity and uncertainty in large scale system
engineering developments and provides some lessons learned from
its application. On the basis of these insights, we propose an
approach to tailoring engineering and acquisition strategies and
practices to the specific circumstances at hand.
Additional Search Keywords
System-of-systems engineering, enterprise-systems engineering, profiling systems, complex systems, managing uncertainty
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