Title: Selected Considerations in Systems of Systems – 1
Authors: Philip Boxer & Suzanne Garcia
Category: Published
Where published: CMU/SEI Technical Note
For many large-scale, systems-intensive organizations, the tempo of operations using software-reliant systems is different from that of the acquisition or development processes for those systems. Organizations use a variety of approaches that attempt to synchronize, for operational use, the integration and fielding of interoperating software-reliant systems. They continue to confront the issue of how fielded software can support the increasing agility needed by a deployed, operational workforce.
This paper describes three concepts that we find useful in explaining the problem and in reasoning about possible solutions: (1) understanding a double challenge related to governance and how an enterprise responds to the demands in its environment, (2) sustaining an operations-driven perspective, even while many of the constraints relate to managing from the central parts of the organizations, and (3) making effective use of stratification, a layered approach to relating key system-of-systems engineering and governance issues.