Improving Outcomes of Major Defense Acquisition Programs by Integrating Program Management and System Engineering Standards from the Information-Data Viewpoint

United States Department of Defense (DoD) Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs) are known to have a tumultuous system development life cycle phase. Despite years of study, policy reform, and additional guidance these types of complex system development programs continue to struggle with achieving desired outcomes. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports from the past several decades have continually emphasized the importance of using knowledge-based practices to achieve desired outcomes on MDAPs. Current acquisition policy, strategy, and guidance implement this recommendation by emphasizing the use of best-practice consensus-based standards to acquire and own the MDAP and defense system's most important information and data, the technical baseline. However, prominent standards portray life cycle models and processes from program-project and system-product viewpoints. A complimentary integrative information-data viewpoint will be explored from the perspective of a factory that uses standards-based operating processes to conceptualize, develop, and produce the defense system's technical baseline. By synthesizing and structuring standards and guides cited in acquisition governance, the paper provides an outcome-oriented approach to align program management and system engineering information and data, processes, and disciplines to achieve incremental and iterative acquisition of this knowledge. In doing so, the paper advances a novel, standards-aligned method for improving outcomes by making acquisition, maturation, and control of the technical baseline, or information-data, the central organizing logic for MDAP operation.