Our extensive experience to bring Technical Engineering Knowledge and Technology Expertise Knowledge can help you address complex systems and planning activities to deliver optimized capabilities, products, and services into operations.
Systems Thinking & Engineering
Bring the Systems Engineering (SE) discipline to assess, understand, and engineer simplified solutions for complex systems and capabilities. By looking at the various components of a complex system/capability using Systems Thinking approach to address the interrelationships, interfaces, and data services, complexity can be broken down into manageable pieces. Using techniques like the ICOM model, Integration Readiness Level (IRL) assessment, interoperability testing strategy, mapping to OPS scenarios & use cases, etc. provides greater insight into the various components. Bringing 40+ years of SE and Technical Management experience on distributed global systems has been successful using these techniques.
Work with the customer (mission/operations) teams to understand the driving requirements, priorities, and OPS scenarios and user cases. Engage with the technical POCs to develop an engineering and solutioni strategy to break out the components and interrelationships for the complex system/capability. Extend this to the software development activities (full life cycle) to ensure that key interfaces, dependencies, data services, and operational flows (data & system) are understood, addressed, and logically mapped out to planned deliverables. Work with the integration, test, deployment, training, and support teams to map out verification and validation plus interoperability to deliver the capabilities that mission/operations needs to perform their daily duties.
Further Reading
Cloud Services & SaaS
Cloud Services dominate in today’s compute, storage, network hosting environments for most corporations and government IT environments. It is critical to leverage the various cloud service provider’s Infrastructure and Platform as-a-services (IaaS & PaaS) to allow business and mission customers to focus on software development, and even take it the next step further in developing these software capabilities into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for greater re-use for current and future customers. SaaS becomes a strategic imperative to drive operations and missions to the next level of delivering operational capabilities more frequently and with more consistency for multiple customers. Why reinvent the wheel when your organization can leverage IaaS, PaaS and deliver reusable SaaS services.
Leverage the commercial Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) for fundamental and common services covering Infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service (IaaS & PaaS) services to focus on software services covering mission, operations, business applications related to supporting daily activities within an enterprise. With the expansion of key CSPs (i.e., Azure, Amazon, IBM, Oracle, Google) cloud services across multiple security domains provide the opportunity to develop common applications that can be reused, redeployed, and marketed as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) services. More organizations and business segments will be able to deploy business applications more efficiently and effectively to maximize their Return on Investment and Time to Market, thereby addressing the requirements and priorities of their customer base on a more timely basis.
Understand the IaaS & PaaS services that the CSPs have matured and tested that can be leveraged for continuous reuse, redeploy, and integrate as a foundation for new software services. This allows for critical resources and skilled technical teams to focus on the business, mission, and operational applications. With up-front SE assessments and software engineering (SWE) strategies, software can be developed for not only quicker deployment into operations but can be reused for other organizations and/or customers that require the same or similar capabilities for their enterprise. Software libraries and services then become foundations for SaaS services for the organization, continuously available for reuse, updates, integration with other software services, and into more complex systems and capabilities that are deployed promptly to cover the ever-changing operational and technical environments businesses operate in.
AI & Autonomous Systems
Artificial Intelligence has been a promising technology for decades but is coming into full fruition and use in operations because of the AI and Machine Learning services being provided by the commercial Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and tremendous increase in computer performance and storage capacity to handle the training, testing, deployment, and automation of AI algorithms for businesses. AI promises to automate data processing, analysis, discovering, correlation, and pattern recognition for very large data sets. This integration with more advanced operational resources, provisioning, and management services will allow systems and services to become autonomous in their daily routines. Autonomous Systems will continue to learn from embedded sensors, enhance performance with dynamic allocation of available resources, and adjust based on ability to understand and react to operational events and trends, utilizing advanced business rules to gain further autonomy within various industries and manufacturing environments.
We identify specific areas that have the potential for the automation of redundant or complex tasks or extracting information and knowledge from large data sets that need to be analyzed, correlated, and assessed for patterns or specific attributes. Artificial Intelligence (including machine learning (ML), human language technology (HLT), and deep learning algorithms) is critical to developing next-generation processing capabilities, analytics, reporting, and visualization tools. Integrating data, metrics, and status into a comprehensive assessment of business capabilities and operational knowledge allows for further integration into Autonomous Systems, that continuously learn and adapt to changes in operational or technical environments.
Data volumes are continuously growing in the information and knowledge-sharing environments of today. Computer resources, data storage and management services, networking/inter-connectivity are dramatically increasing in their capacity and processing performance. CSPs are integrating AI/ML capabilities as standard services for their respective clouds to allow for experts and non-experts alike to leverage these services to exploit, process, analyze, correlate, report, and visualize large volumes of data previously not available without high-end and expensive IT resources. The CSPs make these distributed, expandable, and flexible resources available to paying customers without huge capital investment. SEs, SWEs, Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and Business/Operational Analysts can leverage these software services to better understand the voluminous data and extract critical operational and technical patterns, information, and knowledge from the key enterprise data available to them.
Scalable Enterprise Services
Scalable Enterprise Services encompasses the development of a balanced IT environment with software services that can handle the critical data management, data transactions, data processing, analytics, correlation, data management, event correlation, business rules engines, etc. that organizations need to manage and grow their operations to support their enterprise. Ensuring that a systems thinking approach is critical to work through the details of how all the pieces fit together and overall performance and functionality is required for the enterprise services to integrate, interoperate, and scale effectively and efficiently.
Leverage IT infrastructure (ITI) and well-integrated support services from the CSPs (or hybrid cloud environments) to provide Scalable Enterprise Services for today’s global business and operational environments. Develop applications that are deployed into hosting environments with high-availability, redundancy, scalability, dynamic resource allocation, and mission assurance/COOP capabilities to recover from potential natural or intentional disasters. CSPs provide the stable IaaS and PaaS services plus allow for software (SaaS) services to be deployed into these operational hosting environments to ensure that paid for resources can dynamically support expansion of surges and/or unexpected volumes of enterprise data needs. Collect the health, status, and metrics to dynamically monitor and manage the ITI, associated IaaS & PaaS services, the SaaS services, and business applications in a proactive and autonomous manner.
Security & Compliance
Security and Compliance need to be embedded from the beginning in designing, developing, integrating, testing, deploying, and supporting software services within an enterprise. Understanding and continuously monitoring the security posture for the development, integration, and operational environments are critical to successfully operate the enterprise and prevent internal and external threats, hacking, privacy, mission assurance, and insider threats. Integrating compliance services into operations requires upfront engineering and smart services in operations to ensure that policies, regulations, laws, privacy, and integrity are part of the services supporting the enterprise.
DevSecOps & SAFe
Systems Thinking incorporates the discipline of Systems Engineering to assess and understand the complexity of systems, their interfaces, major components and services, data flows, systems flows, and interoperability and integration of all pieces into a more complex environment. Systems Thinking fundamentally shifts the perspective from how the pieces interrelate in a complex system and how does the system interrelate with its surroundings and environment. As systems, services, and capabilities get more complex, it’s Systems Thinking and Systems Engineering that will provide greater success in deploying these into a more interoperable world.
Bring together the engineering, development, integration, testing, deployment, training, and operational support team aligned with DevSecOps processes and tools and the SAFe framework to address the end-to-end software development life-cycle. Coordinating customer requirements and priorities through the full life-cycle is not only challenging but requires clear alignment of tools, processes, and procedures for these teams. Industry has invested in best practices for processes, standards, and supporting tools to efficiently and effectively track all activities. DevSecOps integrates security and compliance into the life-cycle processes plus SAFe brings in a framework on how all teams should coordinate their activities to ensure that customer requirements, related priorities, and scheduled milestones align appropriately with full transparency and insight into the operational delivery of CPSs into “enterprise scaled” ITI and support services (as part of the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, as supported by the Cloud Service Providers or internal hybrid CSPs).
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