The Programmatics of Acquisition in Systems of Systems

Large, complex systems development has always been challenging, even when the "only" things a program manager had to worry about were cost, schedule, and performance within a single program. The emergence of new operational concepts like network-centric operations, greatly expanded use of joint and combined operations, and rampant growth in system complexity has led to the prevalence of interoperable systems of systems as the preferred solution to providing operational capability. Unfortunately, the "programmatics" (i.e.,  the   relationships between—and orchestration of activities across—all lifecycle aspects, including program management, system acquisition, development, transition/ deployment, sustainment, and operational use) are not well understood in systems of systems and, as a result, system-centric approaches are frequently employed, often with disastrous consequences. To better understand the root causes for these problems, and identify potential mitigation strategies, this paper introduces some simple guidelines—in the form of a set of laws, or meta-behavioral descriptions and a corresponding reasoning framework—to assist program managers with systems-of-systems programmatics.