Systems Engineering in the Information Age: The Challenge of Mega-Systems

Abstract : As it makes the transition from the industrial age to the information age, the Department of Defense, like other government agencies and indeed like the global business community as a whole, is moving aggressively to leverage and capitalize on advances in information technologies. The result is a clear trend away from stand-alone component systems to ones that are richly interconnected and increasingly interdependent. We call these mega-systems. This paper focuses on the engineering of this class of systems which is characterized by increasing scale, the nature and pace of change of the technologies involved, the complexity of system interactions and, perhaps most important, the fact that a single organization rarely owns and has complete control over the mega-system. We hypothesize that engineering these mega-systems is inherently different from engineering large-scale but essentially well-bounded monolithic systems. We develop a framework to understand the differences between well-bounded systems and this new class of systems. On the basis of these insights, we propose an approach to engineering mega-systems that emphasizes experimentation over rigorous requirements definition and continuous evolution over a "grand design".