Building organizational agility into large-scale software-reliant environments

The tempo at which an enterprise creates new uses for its systems is different from that of its acquisition or systems development processes. The military continues to confront the issue of how fielded systems can support the agility needed by its deployed forces. This problem of diverging tempos applies to a variety of large-scale, software-reliant enterprises-such as those found in healthcare and digital communications. This paper posits four realities underpinning an approach to this problem space: the governance-demand double challenge, edge-driven perspective, stratification, and demand cohesion. It uses a particular case example to show how these concepts support the modeling and analysis of the enterprise as a socio-technical system of systems. The paper argues that analyses based on this approach are necessary for making this problem space tractable.