Abstract. The top-down systems engineering strategies that worked well in the 20th century do not adequately address the complexity and interdependencies of today's higher-order systems that often must operate seamlessly with huge and disparate legacy systems. Soft management issues, such as organizational culture, also play a vital role in the organization's system of systems, often called the extended enterprise. Strategy must be formulated—and appropriate deployment mechanisms designed—for the system of systems level.
System of Systems (SoS) has become a popular buzz word among systems engineering practitioners, but what does it really mean? Some professional literature traces the origins of SoS to problems with systems that “nobody owns,”1 while the U.S. Department of Defense has recognized that Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems must be seamlessly integrated with weapons systems in order to achieve optimal SoS effects. This paper offers an explanation of key SoS concepts and proposes some useful practices that the authors have found useful to address the complexities of large-scale integration of SoS assets across the extended enterprise (EE).
