To manage Enterprise Integration effectively, government organizations will need to significantly enhance and link capabilities in three primary disciplines:
1. Engineering
Engineering and technical skills are needed to ensure that standards, interfaces, and infrastructure are well architected to enable interoperability among systems, as well as to allow emerging technologies to plug into developing and existing systems.
2. Operations
Technologists need to understand how warfighters will actually use their solutions. Operational knowledge and experience is required when developing new systems and upgrading existing systems to ensure that C4ISR solutions are user-friendly and tailored to battlefield realities.
3. Acquisition
In-depth knowledge of acquisition policies and processes is needed to coordinate C4ISR acquisitions among numerous stakeholders in the program and operator communities, while also ensuring compliance by all parties with common standards, sharing of common components, etc. Such knowledge will also be important to guide programs through agile and rapid development, and to make sure the programs adhere to the myriad rules and regulations governing DoD acquisitions.
These three skill sets are not entirely new or absent from the current programs, but Enterprise Integration demands a much higher level of expertise and cooperation than most acquisition efforts currently possess. Consequently, government and military organizations will likely need to supplement their own capabilities with industry expertise.
