The Making of a DoD Acquisition Lead System Integrator (LSI)

Abstract

The complexity of developing and acquiring weapons systems continues to increase due to highly integrated system architectures, rapid technology evolution, and emergence of highly diverse set of missions. The imperatives of system-of-systems (SoS) integration and interoperability (I&I) further complicate the system acquisition process. These challenges continue to frustrate completing the acquisition of systems within time and budget goals. The DoD has commonly assigned the role of the lead system integrator (LSI) to a prime contractor. This is fraught with many issues related to conflict of interest, performance, and defining clear roles and responsibilities (especially the inherent role of government). The DoD has indicated that, in some cases, the LSI responsibilities should migrate back to the DoD. In this paper, we discuss the roles of the LSI, where DoD acquisition skills may need to be strengthened to perform as the LSI, and discuss methods and tools to do so. This paper is a result of multi-year discussions and research with a major Naval Systems Command to find a path to faster time-to-market and higher levels of interoperability and integration of our weapons system acquisitions.