Assessment of open architectures within defence procurement issue 1: systems of systems approach community forum working group 1 - open systems and architectures.

Flexibility is a crucial requirement for the systems acquired by MoD. Operational flexibility is required to enable agile mission groups to configure and reconfigure available assets to meet rapidly changing operational requirements. Technical flexibility is required to enable more rapid and effective upgrade of systems, especially in terms of technology insertion. Commercial flexibility is required to achieve value and innovation in procurement. Open systems has been espoused in a number of Government papers as an enabler of this required flexibility. An Open System is one that implements sufficient open specifications or standards for interfaces, services, and supporting formats, to enable properly engineered components to be ported with minimal changes across a wide range of systems from one or more suppliers. An Open (Systems) Architecture applies to a system in which the architecture is published in sufficient detail to enable change and subsequent evolution through the introduction or replacement of modules and/or components from any supplier.