Title: Four Premises Underlying Collaborative SoS
Author: Philip Boxer
Category: Published
Where published: SEI Special Report
For many large-scale, systems-intensive organizations, the tempo of operations using software-intensive systems is different from that of their acquisition, procurement, or development processes for those systems. These organizations use a variety of approaches that attempt to synchronize, for operational use, the integration and fielding of interoperating software. They continue to confront the issue of how fielded software can support the increasing agility needed by a deployed, operational workforce. This difference of tempo is a problem space that is explored in this special report. The Report describes four concepts underpinning working with Collaborative SoS that are useful in explaining the problem and in reasoning about possible solutions: recognizing the double challenge, sustaining an edge-driven perspective, achieving demand cohesion, and using stratification effectively. In this special report, those concepts are illustrated through a situation in the U.S. Army, called software blocking.