Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/304887
S SYSTEMS INTEGRATION www.vanguardcanada.com APRIL/MAY 2014 17 There is a great phrase that you can't get a rocket to the moon just by aiming it; you have to have the ability to course correct, which I always thought was an appropriate concept. You don't get a major system delivery to a military customer without being able to course correct. Evolutionary development and new technology that wasn't there when you first envisioned your program will demand course correction. The "how" will change and the ability to adapt to that inevitable change is crucial to success. One of the things we have within General Dynamics that is help- ing us is called the Engineering Development Framework (EDF). It is a methodology that we built over a number of years of experi- ence with these large-scale system of systems projects that captures lessons observed and makes them new best practices so that the next generation of engineers, of program managers, can benefit. Also, we have the benefit of working with a lot of different partners, and those partners have a lot of smart people. So we take full advan- tage when they are on our team of drawing their insights into this. Q With the complexity of all the components and the fact that you are partnered with so many suppliers, how do you manage the risk in all this? Again, I think experience allows you to perceive where risk can ex- ist and how to be proactive in considering and addressing this risk. The EDF also lends itself as a risk identifier. But one of the most important pieces is a robust measurement framework that mea- sures a number of different pieces of any project – and this isn't just, are we meeting scheduled dates? That robust measurement structure gives you the ability to see problems coming before oth- ers might see them and then impose normal business practices to manage that risk. Successful programs thrive because all the partners on the pro- gram are operating as partners; it's not just a contractual relation- ship. So if GD were to see an issue in a supplier that our metrics told us about, we would instantly reveal that to help them identify and move in the right direction. And vice versa, we would expect the same from them in return….but that's characteristic of true partnership. Q Has the nature of the risk changed over the years? I think it has. I think the depth of buried risk is probably higher today than it has ever been as systems become more complex. By buried risk, I mean risk that, unless you have the experience to seek it out or the measuring framework that triggers you to ask the right question, you may not see it until it is manifest in lots of other ways. Q How do you address the security challenge? Too oen, the criticism of many systems is that the security features are bolted on at the end. This comes back to what we talked about earlier: you've got to build it right. You have to design it to be secure. When you stick security on top, at the end, it is far more expensive, more fraught GD Canada employee demonstrating different components and systems integrated onto the vehicle and controlled by the Battle Management System. If you were designing communications systems, for example, through the lens of the army, you would get a certain level of capability but you certainly would not address the breadth of a system of systems because the army must talk with navy, the air force and other government departments. Under the JIMP construct we have in Canada – Joint, Interagency, Multinational, Public – that system has to talk with agencies and people it might not regularly work with. You have to build your systems with the idea that they will require that level and breadth. This is where ex- perience matters the most: knowing that you have done it before across multiple environments and departments and integrated with legacy systems and emerging systems. If I use the example of what is happening with cellular technolo- gy and the movement towards LTE, my daughter has in the palm of her hand the type of technology we want to give to first re- sponders and militaries, and we know at some point they will have to as part of a multi-agency response. That is a true SoS problem. Those are managerially independent, geographically distributed, operationally independent, and they have their own evolutionary development. So the emergent behaviour is this interoperable sys- tem of systems – that's what we want. But all the bits and pieces need to be understood. Q The integration of the new with the old is a persistent prob- lem for militaries. Are we improving how that is managed? What we are really digging at is the idea of evolutionary develop- ment. And one of the key principles is that you have to build it right. You have to build the infrastructure recognizing it has to be scalable to be able to reach out to evolutionary change. You have to be able to reach back to touch those legacy systems but also be able to see where a technology is going and get out in front of it. If you build a scalable architecture in the beginning for your system, it will lend itself to that degree of flexibility. What I have noticed is we do not lack the ingenuity to find ways to do that. Q It's been said with large tech projects that although ad- vanced detailed plans might seem critical for success, what is far more important is flexibility and agility to quickly adapt because of the level of uncertainty and rapidly changing tech- nology. Given the length of many military projects, how do you deal with this?