The
transition from mass-produced business and financial management systems to systems hosted on rapidly evolving computing platforms that share services and data not only with client systems and user interfaces — but also with a large variety of devices and external systems over the Internet — have left organizations at a loss for adequate guidance, concepts, and approaches. The heightened awareness that comes from the systems-of-systems perspective fills this gap by shifting the usual target, which ordinarily is narrowly focused on a system’s facility of fulfilling an organization's immediate functional requirements — to the dimensions of planned design variability and other quality attributes of the adaptive aspects of systems — surfacing and clarifying the socio-technical alignments of an organization’s mission and business goals with its rapidly evolving and mainly Internet enabled software and systems neighborhoods and industry communities-of-interest.
Moreover, the systems-of-systems perspective facilitates environments where the system configurations required to successfully interact with an organization's collaborators cannot be known in advance and can only be fully understood at precisely the time the organization is faced with an immediate change in its operational need.
The importance of identifying new classes of software and systems quality attributes follow — encompassing the bandwidth of design variability organizations and systems supply — enabling exchanges of services and data among the technical, organizational, and regulatory constituents comprising software and systems neighborhoods and industry communities-of-interest with whom they interact.
Within these neighborhoods and communities-of-interest, constituents (i.e., human and technical agents) negotiate their minimum critical needs with offers of services from other constituents. If the necessary bandwidth of design variability provides the capability to satisfy the minimum critical needs of one counterparty with the best feasible offer of another, negotiation is possible. If not, there is a gap that must be met through contrivances or improvements broadening the design variability supporting the services offered.
That is why the bandwidth of planned design variability and other quality attributes of any given solution stack — in combination with the third parties and external systems with whom some of its components must interact — have potent implications for an organization’s ability to create value and fulfill its mission and business goals.
Talent in selecting software and systems with robust customizability, user friendliness, virtuous interaction design, and a low maintenance style of cross-platform integrability enables skillful development of new capabilities. Indeed, these types of software and systems quality attributes co-develop with the evolving bandwidth of the underlying solution stack's planned design variability. Together, they compose major features of business competition in our Internet enabled 21st century.
