Interoperable Acquisition

At the tail-end of last year, the SEI (Software Engineering Institute) published a paper on ‘Interoperable Acquisition for Systems of Systems‘. Although it has a defence slant (the SEI is largely funded by the US military), there seems to be some considerable relevance for organisations interested in adopting SOA and/or a multi-sourcing model for their IT systems. I struggled through the paper, wincing at the callous mangling of the English language*, only to find that the conclusion was that governance around the procurement, construction and operation of ‘Systems of Systems’ was really hard and the authors wanted more research funds to figure out the solution to the problems. Contrast this with the current hype around SOA as the solution to all an organisation’s IT issues. So the message for us is that we should be careful about diving in to the SOA pool, particularly about what we promise our customers, and that wherever there is uncertainty, there is a consulting opportunity

*The most painful being the use of ‘fielded’ when they appeared to mean ‘deployed’ or ‘in use in the field’. I hate it when they verb nouns like that.