STAKEHOLDER EXPECTATIONS

System solutions must provide expected capability but hide as much design complexity as possible, have simple user interfaces, be understandably failure tolerant, and easy to use. Employing human-centered design and taking into account the entire user experience will be increasingly important to system acceptance.

Systems must be developed and placed into use in a timely fashion to assure customer demand and market conditions are conducive to systems success and provide sponsor value.

Systems, driven by software-intensive designs, are increasingly being used in applications in which human, environmental, and property safety is a significant concern.

Ever increasing levels of safety and resilience must be assured in the face of increasing systems complexity.

System complexity, global connectivity, and IT dependence give rise to system vulnerabilities. The challenges for averting unwanted intrusions or for mitigating the results of intrusions have grown enormously.

Threats must be continuously assessed throughout the system life cycle and solutions implemented, ensuring security and cyber-defense against both ad hoc and organized (national actor) threats.

Systems of the future must be stable, reliable and predictable in order to meet operational needs, achieve customer acceptance, operate efficiently, minimize unintended consequences, avoid liability, and provide expected value. Systems must be validated to be consistent with customer stability expectations across a wide variety of use cases and stress conditions.

Smart systems are able to cope with a changing and unknown environment, assist human operators, or self-organize to provide products and services. Social, functional and physical demands must be integrated to create valuable systems solutions that are resilient in their operational environment.

Stakeholders will demand, as a result of global imperatives and market forces, that systems and services be environmentally sustainable – such as minimizing waste and undesirable impacts to climate change. Sustainability as a system characteristic will be stressed as well as the sustainability ethic of the responsible enterprises.

Systems developers must take into account maintenance costs over the full product life cycle, management of product diversity, pre-planned product evolution and disposal, capture and disposition of knowledge gained from fielded systems, and the ability to perform upgrades while operational. Engineers must be able to balance the often contradictory technologically driven demands of support for deployed systems.

Scalable systems are adaptable to a range of performance and capabilities without breaking their fundamental architecture. This is an important trait because of the high cost associated with initial infrastructure investments or non-recurring engineering costs.

Scalability and adaptability must be a consideration from system inception and be reconciled with the conflicts that scalability often presents for products optimized for single applications.

For systems to be viable they must be affordable within the context of the total cost of ownership. They must provide value to systems sponsors and users, and, very often, the general public. Developers must understand systems value from the perspective of all stakeholders and incorporate these, often competing values, into design decisions.