Creating Operational Capability Through Integration

This investigation reveals many DoD contractors do not treat integration as a stand-alone activity. Instead, integration is an inherent part of the development process. The contractors did not have a specific documented process for integration beyond calling out integration as an activity in the development process. Integration is an integrator unique step within the development process to meet functional and performance requirements. Identification of the interfaces and engineering to match the interfaces requires substantial individual expertise and heuristics for each integration effort resulting in inconsistent non-repeatable integrations. This increases risk, and limits third party integration effectiveness and utility. This paper identifies steps that can be taken to increase the speed and effectiveness of integration while decreasing the effort and dependency on individual expertise.