Raytheon´s use of the Web for engineering

Changes in how large organizations conduct business have created new entities that span geographic boundaries and organizations. Integration of the customer into the role of partner in the full engineering life cycle has brought the necessity to efficiently share information throughout the team, yet protect internal proprietary information. While many companies have used the World Wide Web services to provide human resources type functionality (phone directories, general announcements, etc.), we have exploited Web technologies for engineering purposes. The paper shares some of the opportunities and frustrations inherent in architecting and implementing such an information sharing environment, for internal and external users, within the Software Engineering Laboratory of Raytheon Electronic Systems. One engineering use of the Web at Raytheon has been to create online engineering repositories. Many such repositories are currently in production use. The paper describes the structure and general content of Raytheon´s engineering repositories as well as provide an overview of the lessons learned developing, implementing, and managing these Web based systems. The paper also covers other engineering uses of the Web at Raytheon including applications developed using Web based tools