The acquisition of a System of Systems is just a simple multi-phased parallel-processing paradigm

Much research effort is being expended in an effort to develop new concepts that can be used to solve the problem of managing Systems of Systems. This paper shows that from an information and knowledge management perspective the system and software life cycle (SLC) for a single system is a multi-phased time-ordered parallel-processing recursive paradigm that is little different from the uncoordinated ad-hoc evolution of a System of Systems. Hence, after providing the necessary coordination, information and knowledge management based tools and techniques may be used to control the SLC of each of the individual systems in the System of Systems as well as the System of Systems itself.