Net-centric system development

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) is pursuing a systems philosophy known as net-centricity in an effort to address the rapidly changing nature of military actions across the globe. This philosophy leads to an enterprise consisting of increasingly complex interrelated systems. Numerous failures as well as dramatic cost and schedule overruns on these programs may be symptomatic of the failure of current system development life cycle (SDLC) methodologies employed by the DoD. This paper examines the increasing complexity due to net-centricity and why this complexity may cause traditional SDLC methodologies to fail thus requiring a new methodology to address this level of complexity. The paper then builds on enterprise system engineering research, extant theory (e.g. complexity, control and systems theory) and existing agile development methods to develop a framework for a SDLC methodology tailored to address the unique characteristics of the complex systems inherent to net-centricity.