Profiling Complex Systems

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.