Pat Kirwan

The impact of governance approaches on SoS environments

Governments worldwide are turning to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based systems of systems, commonly termed Electronic Government (eGovernment), to enable more timely, efficient and effective interaction with their citizens and with the business community. Citizens and businesses have dynamic and evolving demands related to the complexity of their lives and operational environments, respectively. A major challenge for government is to be able to understand the value derived from investment in eGovernment in order to improve its consequent ability to respond to the variety of demands of its citizens and businesses. To be able to understand the value derived from planned investments in eGovernment, their analysis needs to extend beyond the familiar approaches that address economies of scale and scope to encompass economies of alignment. These economies of alignment arise from being able to reduce the costs of the multiple forms of collaboration needing to be supported by systems of systems in providing greater responsiveness.

Tutorial 1: Modeling Key Dynamics in Complex Systems (of Systems) Environments: Foundational Concepts

The transition from systems that provide a pre-defined product to ongoing relationships that focus on supporting dynamically changing customer needs over time is moving suppliers from a product-delivery mode to one in which through-life capability management is expected. Appropriately modeling both supply and demand provides participants in this context with a richer understanding of risks and risk mitigations associated with their delivery strategy. This tutorial presents foundational concepts for modeling approaches along with a number of modeling techniques that address different aspects of customer-supplier relationships in dynamic environments.