Foundations of a Governance Framework for Digital Engineering Services Ecosystems

As organizations increasingly chase the potential benefits and competitive advantages of achieving comprehensive digital transformation, they often struggle with the progression of digital engineering (DE) maturity from prototypes and demonstrations to mature operational capability. A significant impediment to this substantial scale-up and maturation process is the establishment of disciplined governance to guide the development and evolution of the systems, processes, methods, and tools comprising the digital engineering enabling ecosystem. Governance for DE must be appropriately sized and scoped to facilitate the establishment of value and the controlled evolution of the ecosystem to address emerging changes in context, needs, threats, opportunities, technologies, and knowledge. This paper describes the foundations of a governance framework for facilitating this critical transition from pathfinder to full-scale implementation, starting with a general framework of key interrogatives (Which, What, Why, Who, How, and Where) that represent some of the key decisions and meta-decisions that constitute governance. The paper defines a notional layered structure for organizing the federated set of services that must be instantiated, operated, and sustained to realize the digital engineering transformation, and establishes a governance organizational structure that aligns with this layered structure. An extended Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) allocation process is described that improves the effectiveness of RACI analysis in establishing roles and responsibilities in an environment in which multi-dimensional collaboration and consensus building is critical. The governance structures and principles described in the paper provide a foundation for organizations to tailor their own governance approach to enable their digital engineering transformations.