Advancing systems engineering for systems‐of‐systems challenges

Engineering activities in future organization development, including various information-based systems, vary, but all result in evolutions of an organization, its capabilities and systems. These evolutions occur in a context of Systems-of-Systems (SoS) where the organization must maintain a sustained, sustainable, and controlled SoS evolution as a whole. This paper presents an understanding of SoS challenges to the application of Systems Engineering (SE) in organizational evolutionary development and discusses the difference between “developing a SoS” and “developing systems in a SoS context” from an SE management perspective. A new approach to SE process organization and management is presented in order to help an organization cope with the high complexity of SoS evolutions and improve its architecture practice. Philosophically different from many SoS SE studies that consider mainly how to develop a SoS, the new approach is to add a dimension or components of SE practice at the organization level that is aimed at creating a better engineering environment to enable effective applications of traditional SE practice in implementing SoS evolutions. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 6: 170–183, 2003