Findings of Case Studies in Enterprise Systems Engineering

The systems engineering community is increasingly facing challenges of engineering enterprises that consist of many interrelated systems without a single hierarchical control authority. Although there are technical papers describing such complex adaptive systems as well as some early papers contributing to the theory of systems engineering of enterprises, there is no generally accepted theory or set of best practices. This paper presents the findings from over a dozen case studies in enterprise systems engineering conducted at the MITRE Corporation during 2005 and 2006. The projects studied were related to the US Air Force's Command and Control (C2) enterprise which is being engineered through many different programs by different contractors for different immediate customers - yet is expected to work as an integrated C2 enterprise. However, the findings presented are applicable to any net-centric enterprise with multiple users, operators and stakeholders.