Today most organizational or societal capabilities rely on a mix of material and non-material ‘systems’ working together to achieve desired outcomes – to achieve their ‘mission’. Organizations typically define mission statements about why they exist – their “reason for being” -- and they use these mission statements as the basis for planning actions and investments. Government or religious organizations often form ‘mission’ teams to achieve a set of goals to share ideas or conduct negotiations. Space and defense organizations commonly refer to planned actions to achieve objectives as their ‘missions’ - e.g. US NASA Apollo mission to the moon. In most cases these include a set of objectives and a plan of actions to achieve these objectives. Recently US Defense has started to apply systems engineering concepts and practices to missions in what is being termed ‘Mission Engineering” - the deliberate planning, analyzing, organizing, and integrating of current and emerging operational and system capabilities to achieve desired mission effects. In this presentation Dr. Dahmann will discuss the motivation for employing systems approaches to mission capabilities as an extension and a broader context for application of systems of systems engineering.

Dr. Judith Dahmann is a Technical Fellow at the MITRE Corporation Center and the capability lead for Systems of Systems (SoS). Dr. Dahmann is the MITRE project leader for SE Technical Support to OUSD R&E supporting mission engineering (ME) activities and the application of digital engineering to ME. She was the technical lead for development of the DoD guide for systems engineering of systems of systems (SoS) and the project lead for ISO 21839, a international standard on ‘SoS Considerations Throughout the System Life Cycle’. Dr. Dahmann is also the task lead for a set of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) SoS programs investigating advanced technology approaches to complex SoS challenges. Dr. Dahmann is an INCOSE Fellow and the co-chair of the INCOSE Systems of Systems Working Group and the co-chair of the NDIA SE Division SoS Committee. She teaches Enterprise SE as an adjunct faculty member of the Johns Hopkins University in the Systems Engineering Program for Engineering Professionals.