Greetings -

This is an exciting time as EPSScentral has received an outstanding set of PCD award entries for 2006, once again representing innovation in performance-centered systems and tools from around the world and across multiple disciplines. Our judging process has begun and award recipients will be featured in a formal press release in early October, 2006. The awards will be presented at the VNU Training and Solutions Conference and Expo in Denver, CO, on October 24th.

Elsewhere on the PCD front, I had the pleasure of presenting another workshop at the Defense Acquisition University (DAU), Ft. Belvoir, VA. It featured Process Performance and Learning Tools (PPLTs). This workshop was open to DAU employees and representatives from the range of government agencies. The purpose was to help program leaders in the Acquisition community to identify areas where performance gaps are best filled by developing and implementing process-centric performance support tools, or "PPLT's" as they are known at DAU. In addition, DAU provided an overview of their strategy moving forward with PPLT development to better address the DoD mission, and how DAU will continue to lead and assist other government agencies in the performance support arena with EPSScentral.

I am keynoting a conference in New York City next week:

Tata Interactive Learning Forum, NYC, 28, September 2006
www.tatalearningforum.com/US2006/index.htm

• Performance Centered Design in the 21st Century: Connecting Knowledge, Performance and Technology

• The Latest and Greatest Tools and Techniques for Developing Performance Support
• Highlights from the 2006 PCD Awards

I look forward to seeing the many readers who attend these events. Again, the 2006 PCD Awards are cutting edge, rich in insight and substance and 100% performance-centered.

Best Regards, 
 

Gary J. Dickelman

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A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

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Since the technology of data warehousing has risen to become common currency, it has been at the epicenter of leading-edge advances in database, data analysis and decision support systems theory and practice -- and for good reason. With experts estimating that the amount of data in any given organization doubles every five years, and with much of this data dispersed across private and public networks using a variety of standards, protocols and operating systems, the question of how to best access, store, organize and make use of it is being examined in a new light.

Some systems have some but not all properties of systems of systems (SoS). We refer to these as SoS-like systems. This report reviews the fundamental process and project-management problems of large-scale SoS-like programs and outlines steps to address these problems. The report has eight sections. Section 1 summarizes current thinking on the nature of future complex systems, and Section 2 discusses the systems-design problems of the future, particularly the partitioning of massive systems into system-of-systems structures. Section 3 points out how large-scale systems development efforts have typically failed because of project-management and not technical problems, and that the solutions to these problems are known and highly effective, but not widely practiced. It explains why, if the project-management problems of the past are not promptly and effectively addressed, large-scale systems development programs will likely be unmanageable. Section 4 discusses the requirements for a scalable process, and Section 5 both reviews and explains the quality-management principles upon which any scalable process must rest. Section 6 reviews the nature of the project-management problems currently faced by large-scale software-intensive system development efforts and explains why attempts to scale up current methods to very large-scale systems work will almost certainly fail. Section 7 describes process strategies for supporting development of a network-like system of systems and it outlines the process and project-management topics needing further research and development. Finally, Section 8 reviews the process considerations for supporting the very large-scale integrated development programs of the future. The report concludes that, unless steps like those outlined in this report are taken in conjunction with continuing technical research and development, the large-scale systems development efforts of the future will almost certainly fail, and often catastrophically.