Publication

Digital transformation is fundamentally changing the way acquisition and engineering are performed across a wide range of government agencies, industries, and academia. Digital transformation is characterized by the integration of digital technology into all areas of an organization, fundamentally changing operations and how results are delivered. It necessitates cultural change centered on alignment across leadership, strategy, customers, operators, developers, and designers.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition workforce needs training to support their transition from current/traditional acquisition practices to digital engineering/acquisition. This report reflects the second option year (OY2) activities for the WRT-1043 Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) research task. The purpose of WRT-1043 is to provide support to the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) in developing new credentials to support the DoD acquisition workforce as it faces the challenges of digital transformation. In particular, the task supports the development of two new credentials in digital engineering (DE) and secure cyber resilient engineering (SCRE).

In OY2, the team supported the faculty teams in developing ENG 5510 and 5520 and provided comments on potential updates to the terminal and enabling learning objectives for 5530. Once the full intermediate DE credential is launched, DAU has plans to develop an “advanced” credential for DE. Critical systems in contested cyberspace require specialized skills beyond conventional information technology (IT) security. The DoD aims to ensure these systems' safety, security, and resilience against adversarial threats. The Systems Security Directorate within the Office of Science and Technology Program Protection (STPP) is leading the effort to establish SCRE which is a systems engineering approach designed to enhance the security and resilience of weapon systems across various operational domains. Initiated in 2018, SCRE seeks to integrate cyber resilience principles into the engineering process from the start, reducing vulnerability to cyberattacks and ensuring adaptability and swift recovery from disruptions. It focuses on developing consistent engineering practices, methodologies, and risk assessments, addressing protection concerns throughout the system lifecycle.

The DAU has been tasked with creating a credential enabling the workforce to understand and execute the fundamentals of SCRE. This report describes the work of the SERC over the past three years, as part of WRT-1043, in supporting DAU in that task. Over the three-year effort, the SERC team supported DAU by contributing content for CYB-5610 (Cybersecurity & Resiliency for Weapons, Control, and IT Systems) and CYB-5620 (Adversity-Driven Engineering). The SERC team created learning objectives, digital notebooks, models within model-based systems engineering platforms, courses, modules, learning knowledge reviews and exam questions, narratives, and more to support the effort. For CYB-5620, the SCRE team delivered instructional content over a three-day informal pilot of the course. The team took a modular approach to development of instructional materials to support agility in course composition and adaptation.

The team also coordinated with the teams that were developing the systems engineering (SE) and mission engineering (ME) credentials.

This is the final year of this task. The team has developed recommendations based on its experiences with the DAU faculty, including:

• DAU should continue investing in the original project vision. It would be useful to consider more cloud-based approaches that could enable more flexibility and perhaps be hosted outside of DAU’s native environment while meeting their security needs.

• Given the challenges and expense of software licensing, DAU could collaborate with other government agencies for tool licensing agreements that can be employed to improve purchasing power.

• DAU should consider creating and maintaining a model that links the Engineering and Technical Management (ETM) competency framework to the competencies addressed by existing and in-development assets, building on the models created in the SCRE credential.

• While it is understood that implementing prerequisites can be difficult, judicious application of prerequisites should be considered.

• DAU is in a position to create a succinct resource that helps to clarify these concepts. A video or micro-training that can readily walk through these concepts in a way that can be grasped across multiple functional areas would prove high value to the community.