1 Enterprise-wide Requirements & Decision Management

Decision-making is one of the most fundamental processes contributing to a corporation's success, yet in many companies, decisions are often characterized as ad-hoc events without a clear linkage to supporting information, tradeoff studies, or clearly stated rationale. Furthermore, the "information" used to support these decisions is often in the form of complex, unstructured documents which lack clear linkages between their content. As a result, future decision- makers are often not able to benefit from the collective experiences of their predecessors. Consequently, there are no cycles of learning and the same mistakes are often repeated each time that a similar decision is made. It is clear that the most successful companies in the future will be those who can effectively manage and leverage the "intellectual capital" generated by the decision making process (the thinking engine of systems engineering) and the linkage of that process to essential supporting information. This paper describes an approach to address the deficiencies in the prevailing methods for requirements and decision management by proposing an enterprise-wi de approach which provides for a true "learning organization" capability in the form of reusable decisions frameworks.