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55
Electronic Integrated Product Development as Enabled by a Global
Information Environment: A Requirement for Success in the
Twenty-First Century
Thomas C. Rochow, George E. Scarborough,
and Frank David Utterback
McDonnell Douglas Corporation
This paper discusses the needs manufacturing organizations will
face in the near future in working electronically and
collaboratively to develop, market, and support products for the
global marketplace. One of the necessary conditions for success is
a rich and robust information environment. It is essential that
this information environment be implemented to keep pace with the
practical needs of the organizations that use it. Users and
enablers must mutually support each other if the journey is to be
made in time for the travelers to survive and prosper.
Statement of the Problem
Manufacturing organizations today face a confusing and
constantly changing global marketplace. Customers have fewer
resources to procure products and services. They are less tolerant
of performance below expectations, and their expectations are
higher. Budgets are tight and getting tighter as economic
constraints force industrial companies and customer organizations
to become lean. Competition is fierce. Outsourcing requires an
integration of services that is far more difficult than when the
services resided within the same organization. Product delivery
times must be reduced, with no loss in quality. Cost has joined
performance as a primary discriminator in competition, and the cost
time frame encompasses the entire life cycle of a product.
It is the rare company that can address the competitive needs of
the marketplace entirely with its own resources. Many organizations
are reverting to a simple and proven approach, with a modern twist
that offers great promise but also brings great difficulties. The
simple approach is generally referred to as concurrent
engineering—getting the right people together, in a timely
manner, giving them the right information and tools, and supporting
them as they work. The modern twist is that the people,
information, tools, and support elements are not usually cohesive
or localized, and tend to change in composition over time.
The people are from different organizations, and seldom can more
than a few be assembled in the same place. The time frames in which
they must work have been greatly collapsed. The information they
need to do the job is in various electronic and paper forms
scattered in all directions. The tools are often software
applications that should, but usually do not, play well together.
The automation infrastructure necessary to tie all together is
often reminiscent of a railway system spanning countries with
different gauges of track.
The need is for integrated development of a product, executed
globally and electronically, by what is referred to as a virtual
enterprise. Industrial organizations are beginning to work this
way, albeit in an embryonic or at best adolescent sense. But enough
has been done to prove it is possible. The challenge is to make it
practical. The compound question to be answered is this: What is
required to emplace an environment that facilitates globally
distributed teams—of people and organizations, customers and
providers—to collaboratively develop products and support them
worldwide throughout their useful life, at costs that are
affordable, with performance that meets or exceeds expectations? It
is the classic engineering problem of producing optimal results
within practical constraints. In this case, these constraints are
resources, technology, culture, and time.
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This paper is written from the perspective of an aerospace
manufacturer. Although some differences with other industries
exist, the essence of the needs, problems, and solutions for
electronic integrated product development should be similar across
industry sectors.
Background
Aerospace is a high-technology industry that necessarily pushes
the envelope of the possible. It has been said that aerospace
therefore is not a good example of the manufacturing industry as a
whole. If that were ever true, it is certainly not so today.
Although aerospace manufacturing technologies are often state of
the art, they must increasingly be applied within constraints of
practicality; there must be a business pull. We must be innovative
in how we work, do more with less, and concentrate on making an
affordable product, not a masterpiece. These are common needs among
manufacturing organizations today. Fortunately, aerospace can
return to its roots for salvation, and other industries should be
able to do the same.
The Early Days
In the early decades of this century, airplane manufacturers
assembled their resources in a hangar and loft. Design,
manufacture, and assembly were carried out by the same group of
people, who often had close ties with those who would operate and
support the product. Experienced staff and funds were scarce.
Innovation and teamwork were necessary conditions for success. The
processes by which work was accomplished were identified implicitly
by the workers, who were usually considerable stakeholders in the
enterprise. Processes were reengineered on the fly, and all
concerned knew why and with what results. This scenario can differ
little from those in other industries in their early days of
growth.
Growth and Decline
What happened, of course, is that as airplanes grew more
complex, and specifications from different customers began to
diverge, specialties grew and companies reorganized to gain
efficiencies. As markets expanded commercially and governments
began to focus on aviation, performance often became more important
than product cost; and product cost was considered that of
acquisition only rather than including support through a number of
years. Upstream innovation to help downstream functions was mostly
lost. Information of a "total-product" nature was not available, as
functions concentrated on what was needed from their narrow
perspectives. A world war followed by the beginning of the Cold War
put increasing emphasis on survival, and thus on product
performance in increasingly complex missions. Cost retreated
further as a major consideration.
The boundary conditions began to change in the last decade or
so. As the capability of the threat increased, the likelihood of
drawn-out conflict decreased. The ability to keep weapons systems
available for action a larger percent of the time became
increasingly important. As product complexity grew to meet the
growing threat, cost regained its place as a prime factor in
product selection, and a product's life-cycle aspect emerged. With
the disappearance of the threat to survival in the last few years,
coupled with the lethargy of the global economy and its effect on
commercial aircraft sales, aerospace was suddenly presented with a
completely new marketplace, with new rules and conditions, not yet
stabilized. The question of survival began to apply not to the
nation but rather to the company.
The resulting gyrations of downsizing and becoming lean to meet
market realities are well known. Though perhaps in some cases the
scope and degree are less, other industries are experiencing
similar trauma. There are fatalities, mergers, and a return to a
focus on base expertise. Increasingly organizations are analyzing
where they need to go, from what basis; when they have to arrive to
survive and prosper; and how they might proceed within practical
constraints.
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Return to Basics
Aerospace has begun, and has actually made considerable
progress. The experience of McDonnell Douglas Corporation (MDC)
over the past several years is probably typical of many
high-technology companies. We have recognized that affordability of
products from a life-cycle perspective is a paramount
consideration. This of course assumes that the products will meet
or exceed customer expectations. We have realized that improved
business processes are a most important element and have
concentrated on the documentation, analysis, and improvement of
those processes key to product development. Increasingly,
management of our business is based on management of our
processes.
We have also realized that we must return to the base values and
practices of our industry. We have reorganized along the lines of
concurrent engineering, MDC's term for this being integrated
product development (IPD). This has been done in our functional
support units as well as in our aircraft and missile programs. We
have also returned to our base expertise, divesting ourselves of
interests not closely aligned with the core elements of our
products. We have outsourced much of our automation support and
have aggressively struck teaming relationships with companies
around the world, some of which continue to be our competitors in
other acquisitions. Our IPD teams include customers, teaming
partners, subcontractors, and suppliers. As we execute IPD, we have
come to understand the prime importance of our information assets,
and we are taking steps to analyze and evolve these assets—old
and new—to make their provision to IPD teams adequate for the
purposes of decisionmaking and task execution in an electronic IPD
environment.
Status and Challenge
MDC is pleased with its progress, but far from satisfied. The
F/A-18E/F Hornet approaches first flight in December 1995 with the
program on schedule and within budget, and with the aircraft
meeting technical performance parameters and being below its weight
specification. The program critical design review (CDR) found fewer
than ten action items to be addressed—none critical. This
compares with several hundred required actions found historically
across the industry at CDR. The major credit for this performance
is given to the collaborative IPD teams that are developing the
aircraft with the highly visible, aggressive, and positive
participation of an involved and enthusiastic Navy customer. There
are no surprises on the F/A-18E/F.
As part of this initial success story, MDC has applied practical
automation enablers in key areas. The aircraft is all digital. We
execute an electronic development process that substitutes digital
geometry models for the traditional physical mockup. We define
structural and systems interfaces with our major subcontractor,
Northrop Grumman, and perform design reviews and resolve fit and
function issues in real time, with data models shared
electronically between St. Louis and Hawthorne, California. The
product is defined in terms of assembly layout, build-to, buy-to,
and support-to packages, containing all the information necessary
for a qualified source to provide the part, assembly, system, or
service. Discipline in the execution of the processes by which
these packages are created, reviewed, approved, and released for
manufacture or acquisition is applied by a control and release
system that also ensures the integrity, completeness, and
consistency of the data. Customers, co-contractors, subcontractors,
and key suppliers are linked electronically.
Although pleased with this progress, we have also learned how
far we must still go to be truly competitive in tomorrow's world.
We must be able to execute electronic IPD as effectively and as
efficiently as Charles Lindbergh and the folks at Ryan Airlines
applied traditional concurrent engineering to the design and
construction of The Spirit of St. Louis, in a hangar in San
Diego during a critical 2 months in the spring of 1927. We must do
this with teammates from organizations distributed around the
world, including sophisticated giants and simple machine shops that
nevertheless provide individual links that will set the strength of
the chain. We must be able to collaborate, in real time, on
unforeseen problems in short time frames. We must have immediate
access to the information critical to the task at hand, be it a
management corrective action or making an information package
deliverable against a tight schedule. The information access must
be controlled, the data exchanges must be secure, and the
information provided must be correct, complete, consistent, and
pertaining to the right configuration of the part or system.
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This future state is necessary for our continued participation
as a major player in our marketplace, just as it must be necessary
to the success of every modern organization for which collaboration
and information are essential to survival. And the time frame in
which we must emplace the enabling environment is short. Certainly
by the turn of the century, successful organizations will work in
this way.
We should be optimistic rather than overwhelmed, since enough
capability has been demonstrated to prove the concept. Yet the
issues are substantial. Progress must also be substantial,
immediate, and continuing if we are to arrive at our destination in
time to remain competitive.
Not the least of the elements that enable electronic IPD is the
provision of information in a cost-effective manner to diverse
teammates around the world—information that resides in a vast
heterogeneous "information space" itself distributed globally.
However, all the elements are interrelated, and a certain level of
understanding of them all is necessary to provide integrated
solutions to specific needs.
Forecast
Common among successful manufacturing organizations will be
their ability to assemble themselves in whatever virtual
configurations are necessary to identify, scope, pursue, and
capture business, and then perform to specifications within budget
and schedule constraints. Business will be won and executed by
virtual enterprises. These will not be static over the life of a
product but will change with conditions and the ebb and flow of
requirements and capabilities. Participants will include customer
organizations, high-technology partners and subcontractors, and
suppliers with various levels of capability and sophistication.
The mechanisms by which teams interface and operate must in
large measure be common, as solutions specific to only one
opportunity will be too costly for most players. Work processes
will be executed in a collaborative manner, in real time where
appropriate, by teammates distributed physically and in time.
Collocation will be electronic, and information needed for the task
at hand will be immediately accessible and usable with little or no
preparation. Information will be provided through a variety of
electronic media—text, graphics, voice, and video. Huge
volumes of data will be stored, accessed, viewed, and moved. This
will have to occur efficiently, accurately, securely, and
affordably.
There is little question that this scenario must be realized in
the immediate future for successful enterprises. The prosperity of
a nation will be proportional to the success of its commercial and
government entities as they participate in the interaction of the
global scene. The obstacles to the emplacement and effective
operation of this environment are significant, and the cost of
solutions in time, labor, and money will be as well. It is
essential that government and industry, while retaining the essence
of fair competition that is a core American value, become partners
in providing cost-effective common solutions to shared obstacles
that prevent establishing the proverbial level playing field.
Analysis
Some of the elements necessary for success in the collaborative
global marketplace that is upon us are discussed in the following
sections. We identify some obstacles to their successful
emplacement, suggest an approach for implementation, and discuss
options for joint pursuit of common objectives.
Elements Necessary for Success
There is a close relationship between the collaborative
processes by which we must do business and the policies,
procedures, standards, and automation by which the necessary
information is provided in a timely way to the team members
executing (and evolving) the work processes. Processes and
information are both necessary elements for success. Neither
processes nor tools are sufficient by themselves. They must not
only coexist but also actively support each other. Innovation in
identifying better ways to work is often materially dependent on
the availability of key information and the timely participation of
dispersed teammates. The many opportunities
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for innovation in providing essential information quickly, or
electronically collocating key participants, are beyond all
practical means of simultaneous pursuit. The opportunities need to
be prioritized, scoped, and scheduled based on practical
requirements for business success.
This suggests that the current emphasis on business process
reengineering is appropriate and that it should proceed with a
clear appreciation of the importance of providing information to
process steps and players. It is hard to identify points of process
integration, or key collaborations or decisions, in which
information flow and content do not play a deciding role. Processes
must change, but in a manner that is consistent with the practical
ability of information technology to provide the right data to the
right participants at the right time.
Information in electronic form is growing at a tremendous rate.
This growth has now reached the point that it can easily drown a
team as it attempts to find and use information related to its
objectives. Being able to effectively locate and access pertinent
information is important, but it is equally important to do so with
the user in control, and protected from the onslaught of unwanted
data and the uncertainty and inefficiencies of unstructured
searches.
Automation Enablers
There are any number of ways to categorize the automation
enablers of information provision. We have chosen for our purposes
to identify four aspects:
•
Software that an individual user or team applies
to create, analyze, or change data pertinent to a work step. This
is often specific to a discipline, and we refer to such software as
end-user applications.
•
Software and hardware that provide controlled
access with appropriate security to information and related
software applications, by individuals according to assigned
privileges.
•
Software that manages information (i.e., that
ensures its integrity, correctness, completeness, currency, and
relevance to the specific product configuration or version being
addressed by the user).
•
The underlying elements, or infrastructure, that
enable physical access to, retrieval or view of, or operations on
the data permitted to the user. These elements include the hardware
and software of networks; various hardware devices for storage and
display of, and operation on, data; software such as operating
systems, and software that supports desktop capabilities, file
transfers, and electronic mail; and the various data and
communication standards that facilitate data transfer.
All these enablers must function well and in an integrated sense
if the information provision environment is to be effectively
available to individuals and teams executing business processes. In
the desired near-future state, they must also perform in much the
same way for the variety of virtual enterprises in which individual
organizations may find themselves.
Lessons from Experience
To help identify specific requirements and obstacles, we now
summarize MDC's practical experiences to date in our initial
exercise of electronic IPD.
As mentioned previously, MDC has concentrated heavily on the
electronic development process for the F/A-18E/F, collaborating
with Northrop Grumman. This has given us valuable experience in the
sharing and exchange of large amounts of data in various electronic
forms. Policies, processes, procedures, automated tools, and
infrastructure have evolved. Security and communications
requirements have been identified and met. For a close and
intensive interaction with a large sophisticated partner, we are
comfortable with our ability to perform.
To extend interaction to our customers, and to subcontractors
and suppliers with whom we interact more simply or less often, we
have established a simple mechanism that we call the CITIS Node. It
had its genesis several years ago in our new business area, as a
proof of concept of the spirit of controlled access to data and
applications suggested by the draft MIL-STD-974 for a contractor
integrated technical information service
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(CITIS). Based on a database of user profiles, within the
constraints of a security firewall and the data access granularity
of specific applications, we allowed execution of applications, and
through them access to data. In some cases, this was access "in
place"—that is, access at the source of the data store. In
other cases, data were uploaded to the CITIS Node server and either
accessed there or transferred to the requester's system.
No attempt was made initially to include the basic or optional
functions identified in MIL-STD-974; this functionality was to be
added instead as required for a CITIS under specific contracts.
What we found as we demonstrated this proof of concept to various
customers and suppliers was that there were immediate opportunities
to use the CITIS Node, in all its simplicity, for exchange of
production data. Suppliers were especially eager to do so. Over the
space of several years, initially with individual suppliers to our
new products area but increasingly with customers and suppliers in
all our current programs, we have added users to the CITIS Node and
have augmented its operation.
Today the CITIS Node supports over 750 users, with growth to
2,000 users expected by the end of 1995. A strategic alliance has
been formed with a small disadvantaged business, Aerotech Services
Group, for the Node's administration and support. Aerotech also
provides hookup and help services to suppliers if they so desire.
Over the next few years the CITIS Node will be expanded to
accommodate the needs of all our programs and production centers,
with additional functionality added to address the kinds of
operations specified by both military and commercial perspectives
of CITIS.
The significance of this story is not MDC's current capability.
Other organizations today can present a similar status. The
significance is our growing understanding of the obstacles
encountered and the lessons we are learning, through the dual
experiences of F/A-18E/F electronic collaboration and the extension
of electronic IPD to a broad range of suppliers and customers
through the CITIS Node.
Here are some our findings:
•
A clear understanding of the work process is
essential if it is to be reengineered to benefit from electronic
IPD.
•
Nothing is harder to facilitate than the change of
a work process. This is a cultural change, often a change from what
has been a successful process in the past. Human beings, perhaps as
a result of a built-in predisposition to protect the species from
the unknown, are strongly resistant to change.
•
If a change is to be made, it can seldom be
dictated. It must occur through producing clear evidence that it is
beneficial to objectives in which the organization has a vested
interest. This is best done through execution of the new process by
real users doing production work, with proof of the benefits
captured through accepted metrics.
•
New procedures, techniques, and the application of
automated tools must be straightforward and simple, and accompanied
by sufficient training and on-site support.
•
Production implementation to any reasonable extent
must clearly pay for itself in the near term, usually within a
year.
•
Collaboration cannot succeed unless all
participants have a compatible automation environment. This is
difficult enough to obtain within a single organization. It is much
more so when extended to customers and suppliers in various stages
of automation implementation. Concepts of operation—who will
do what, when, involving what data and with what basic software and
hardware—for all participants are essential.
•
Organizations can begin simply by exchanging
digital data. However, to realize the maximum benefits from
electronic IPD, real-time collaboration is necessary. This often
entails viewing large amounts of data, for example in an electronic
development fixture. Current costs to support this are prohibitive
except in specific instances.
•
Electronic collaboration requiring large volumes
of data, such as electronic development of product geometry,
requires broad-bandwidth digital services. Shared screen sessions
are usually asymmetric, and a narrow back channel will suffice.
When videoconferencing is used, the back channel must be
symmetric.
•
Current interoperability among networks leaves
much to be desired, especially internationally. Connections must be
initiated well in advance. Short-fused collaboration is next to
impossible.
•
The Internet is not viable for conducting the more
demanding aspects of product development. It is unreliable, not
secure, and cannot support large-volume data transfers with
acceptable performance.
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•
Standards and supporting software are far from
what they must become if data sharing and exchange are to be
effective as enablers of the virtual enterprise. The processes used
to define and validate standards do not primarily serve the needs
of the user community. Standards too often do not support real
needs and take far too long to mature; vendor-specific
implementations are common.
•
Suppliers, especially small and medium-size ones,
can be overwhelmed by the need to interact with multiple
contractors, as most will have to do to survive. They require help
to identify the basic environment to put in place, as well as
training, advice, and support at affordable cost.
•
Few manufacturing organizations can afford to take
uncertain risks as they move toward electronic IPD. Progress must
be made with proven technology that can be extended as business
conditions allow.
•
Finally, cost structures of automation elements
and services must accommodate the need of organizations to pay as
they go. Unless business cases can be developed through production
pilots to validate real benefits and the manner in which to capture
them, organizations will be inhibited from moving forward at a
reasonable pace.
Recommendations
The need for U.S. organizations of all kinds and sizes to be
able to participate in the collaborative global marketplace is
obvious. Many of the obstacles are too large for specific solutions
worked by individual players, or even by industry sectors or
government agencies. For reasons of cost sharing and timely
progress, U.S. industry and government must work together and must
jointly cooperate with the rest of the world. The problems are
global in nature. All concerned will profit if the solutions are
also global.
The information environment must be defined and implemented with
a clear understanding of its use, in the sense both of providing
support for current production needs and providing for future
growth by timely identification and validation of extended
capabilities.
There has been much discussion of the information superhighway
and of the associated visions of the defense information
infrastructure, the national information infrastructure (NII), and
the global information infrastructure (GII). These are well worth
pursuing, but it is also useful to consider the example of the
transportation system in defining a practical information
environment, setting priorities, and supporting the implementation
and integration of the various elements.
Besides superhighways, a national transportation system must
have access and exit ramps, outer roads, local roads, and streets
leading to neighborhoods of homes, schools, stores, and industrial
parks. It must have laws, regulations, and tests to accommodate
experienced drivers, beginners, and those with special needs. It
must have stop lights, stop signs, and informational signs. It must
provide maps of various levels of detail, and triptychs where
appropriate. It must provide a measure of free advice and
assistance, as well as affordable services for fuel, maintenance,
repair, and other needs. And its users must be prepared for travel
in similar but different environments in other countries around the
world, with common regulations negotiated at the national level, as
well as reciprocal acceptance of national standards.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to complete a detailed
comparison of the information provision environment with the
transportation environment we all know so well. One difference is
worth noting: The buildup of the transportation system was mostly
serial, expanding from a local base, and it occurred during a more
leisurely time. The elements of the information environment must be
addressed in parallel because of the pressure of fast-moving
events, and no elements can be ignored, no matter how insignificant
they may seem. All are necessary for its successful operation.
A Collaborative Information
Environment
Our primary recommendation is that industry and government
together must define and describe an information environment to
support electronic integrated product development—and most
other kinds of business interactions—as carried out in virtual
enterprises. They must then jointly implement and enhance this
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environment over time, concentrating on addressing key aspects
that can best be worked in common for the benefit of all, and
taking special care to enable small and medium-size businesses to
become active players.
This will require traditional planning and project management
efforts. It will also require an innovative approach to gathering
requirements, validating elements of the environment, and
aggressively addressing common problems and issues in much shorter
time frames than those experienced today. A proactive collaborative
approach is necessary to quickly identify and emplace a basic
information environment that can then be developed as aggressively
as available resources, technology, and culture will allow.
There follow recommendations on specific obstacles, based on
McDonnell Douglas's experience to date. The concluding section
discusses mechanisms for a joint effort to define, emplace, and
enhance the overall information environment.
Small and Medium-Size Businesses
We need to offer small and medium-size businesses special help.
This should include help with understanding the environment and how
to get started and grow in capability at a practical rate. It
should include advice and training opportunities. One aspect should
be a free initial consultation; a second should be identification
of a set of service providers who offer continuing assistance at a
reasonable cost.
Several government-funded providers of such services exist. Two
of these are the NIST/Manufacturing Technology Centers and the
Electronic Commerce Resource Centers, funded by NIST. There are
undoubtedly others. One essential task is to identify such existing
entities and recommend how they might best cooperate to meet the
need and minimize redundancy.
Standards
Standards bodies need to be driven by users and to acquire a
sense of the urgency of the real world. There should be effective
mechanisms to collect and channel real requirements and to
facilitate rapid prototyping and accelerated validation of draft
standards. Users need to take back the initiative from the
standards bodies and the vendor community. Standards are also
information products, and they will benefit from collaborative
development.
Affordable and Timely
Implementation
The investment in new automation to execute electronic IPD is
daunting for large organizations. There is a legacy of software and
hardware that cannot easily be replaced without hard evidence of
reasonable return on investment in a short time frame. In addition,
however inefficiently they may be supported with current processes
and tools, production work and new business efforts are ongoing and
cannot be put at risk during the transition to a better world.
Often there is a catch-22. For example, Department of Defense
production contracts include no funds for government upgrades in
processes and tools to complement contractor internal upgrades.
Business cases to obtain funding usually require verified benefits
in a production environment. Automation vendors are often reluctant
to support contractors and their customers in such pilots, merely
in the hope of eventual broad production use.
This does not mean progress is not made, but it is slow and
painful to line up the participating parties and their resources.
The completion of desired connections through existing physical
paths can also be exceedingly slow, taking a minimum of 60 to 90
days, often much longer. This inhibits aggressive expansion and
prevents the flexibility needed to take advantage of short-fused
opportunities.
There is a need for an innovative sense of joint partnership to
define and validate new processes and tools quickly, with shared
risk, among the players. Ways must be found to emplace the overall
environment in an affordable manner and to pay for implementation,
enhancement, and ongoing support in a shared way from captured
business benefits.
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Access and Security
Electronic collaboration requires ready access to information.
But of equal importance is limiting access to and operations on
information in accordance with assigned privileges—not only
for reasons of commercial or national security, but also to ensure
the integrity of the data against malicious or inadvertent
alteration. Access and security make opposing demands on an
information environment, and we must find ways to strike a
practical balance. Understanding the requirements of electronic
collaboration in support of production work, and collaboratively
addressing them, is the preferred approach.
The logical course is to move to the Open Software Foundation
Distributed Computing Environment, supplemented with security
products based on public-key encryption such as RSA (named after
its authors, Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman). Robust firewall systems
must provide security for controlled entry into an organization's
data environment, with systems such as those provided by product
data management vendors to further limit access to, and operations
on, specific data.
Self-Diagnosis and Prescription
We are entering a complex and fast-changing world. All the
involved organizations, perhaps especially the smaller players,
should continually evaluate where they are, where they need to be,
and how to get there in a reasonable manner. There is a need for a
practical way to make this evaluation and to plan corrective action
and future growth. A capability model is required that can be
self-applied. It should be as simple as possible and still give the
needed answers. It should support the growth of capability in a
series of finite steps from initial simple participation to
attainment of the full sophistication of a virtual enterprise, with
easily understood entrance and exit criteria for each step.
Two related and complementary efforts along these lines come to
mind. The first is a CALS Enterprise Integration Capability model
under development by the EDI World Institute in Montreal, under the
leadership of Susan Gillies. The second is a CALS Electronic
Commerce Continuum model proposed by Mike McGrath at the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency. The CALS Industry Steering Group
is currently serving as a forum to support and relate both
efforts.
An Information Environment Atlas
Industry and government need an atlas of the near-term global
information environment that identifies and explains the elements
and their relationships, and how they can be used to support
electronic integrated product development. This should be a natural
by-product of a plan to emplace the information environment. It
should identify and describe the elements and their interrelations.
It should give guidance for connecting into the environment
initially and for growing in ability to use its sophisticated
capabilities. It should identify where to go for advice and help,
from both government and commercial sources. It should include
models and techniques for self-assessment of status and for
determining readiness to move to a higher level of capability. It
should include references for more detailed information. Finally,
it should describe the forums and mechanisms by which the
information environment is supported and advanced, and how
individuals and organizations can become active in the forums and
participate through the mechanisms.
Forums and Mechanisms
We need forums and mechanisms to define and execute the plan to
emplace and support the information environment we have been
discussing. This includes defining practical scenarios of how we
must work and from which we can draw requirements for policies,
processes, and automation enablers valid across industry sectors.
We then need to validate these elements in support of real
production work and capture the metrics and lessons learned with
which to justify broad implementation.
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It is difficult for individual industries or government agencies
to address this need. We should instead have a means to assemble
the appropriate representatives and do the job for all. This is not
to say that individual elements should not be addressed by the most
appropriate organizations. But the description of the environment,
the generation of an overall work plan to achieve and sustain it,
and the monitoring of its implementation and enhancement should be
done by an entity that is representative of all the players.
Two ways come to mind to accomplish this. One is to convene an
ad hoc team, and the other is to use an existing organization of a
multiplayer nature. In either case, a description of the
environment and a work plan should be generated quickly. The work
plan should be of sufficient detail to allow selection of the best
means to achieve each major deliverable.
An existing organization that would be a viable candidate is the
CALS Industry Steering Group (ISG). It is chaired by USAF LtGen
(retired) Jim Abrahamson and has members from many industries as
well as close liaison with government agencies. It has recently
restructured to emphasize the requirements of both the commercial
sector and the government, and seeks to enable the reengineering of
business processes through the effective and efficient sharing and
exchange of data electronically. It has begun to negotiate
agreements with organizations having similar interests to support a
focus on common problems and to avoid redundant and perhaps
competing uses of resources.
One advantage an existing organization has is that it would be
positioned by its charter and interests to act in a coordinating,
monitoring, and steering role, as well as offering a mechanism for
actually executing parts of the plan. It could collect common
requirements and issues and act as an ''honest broker" in
facilitating common solutions. It could also coordinate production
validation of solutions through pilots in its member organizations,
as well as support prototyping of new technologies. It is user
driven, which is essential if the new environment so facilitated is
to be practical and responsive.
If an organization such as the CALS ISG were chosen as a prime
mechanism, it would be important that full-time staff be provided
to complement the mostly volunteer resources that currently support
its efforts. There is no substitute for the enthusiasm and ability
of the dedicated and talented volunteer, but the realities of the
business world necessarily limit the time and energy these
individuals can provide.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
electronic ipd
