have to be able to build business cases, which is not trivial to do. Business cases should be built far enough in advance that they can influence your budgeting process; this means that the life-cycle planning has to be carried out years in advance. There is little value in build- ing a business case that says you ought to redesign the system six months from now if the budget is fixed three years in advance and doesn’t include funding for the redesign.


• Consolidate supply and demand. Chances are, if you need the part, some- one else does as well. There may even be a third party who is going to throw the part away because they have too many or no longer need it. Solutions like DLA’s Shared Data Warehouse are intended to facilitate visibility into common needs and inventory across all the services.


Q. How long does the process of plan- ning for obsolescence take? Does it complicate the acquisition process or simplify it? Is this planning process worth risking a delay in implementation of the tactical network?


A. The most time-consuming portion of the strategic planning process is data gath- ering. Usually the appropriate data exists, but rarely is it all owned by the same per- son. This data includes: bills of materials that include manufacturer part numbers, part types, obsolescence status (obsolete or not), part prices, qualified alterna- tive parts, existing lifetime buys if any, observed or predicted failure rates, etc.


The first time a program attempts to do strategic refresh planning, it could take months to pull together the necessary data, but after that it should be much quicker. In some cases, the necessary data resides with a subcontractor from whom


NETWORKING


Boeing Network Systems Engineer Jason Fair checks the software on an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. (U.S. Army photo by Drew Hamilton.)


the “data package” was not acquired. When this happens, it can be a showstop- per for strategic planning.


The cost avoidance associated with stra- tegic planning to manage obsolescence can be significant; the planning can avoid or minimize the future unavailability of systems. Is it worth the risk of imple- mentation delay? Hard to say. This is an application-specific issue that needs to be addressed when making a business case to perform strategic management.


Q. What is typically the weak link in obsolescence planning for an entire net- work? Where do you think the Army might be most vulnerable as it builds and acquires a tactical network?


A. There are several obsolescence man- agement vulnerabilities in the ways that organizations build systems today. One common issue is understanding that obsolescence is not just a hardware issue;


it’s also about software. In fact, lots of folks would gladly change hardware to fix a software bug if they could.


That is to say, software is a worse problem. Most hardware obsolescence events fall into the category of “weak” obsolescence events that allow continued system man- ufacturing and the operation of fielded systems with the obsolete part as long as you have an ample supply of the part available.


Many software obsolescence events are


“strong” events, in which continued man- ufacturing of new systems and operation of fielded systems may not be allowed when the software becomes obsolete.


For example, the end of support for a commercial software package—one possible definition of software obsoles- cence—means the end of security patches, which may dictate that the software can- not be used within systems. Software


A S C . A RMY.MI L 105


CRITICAL THINKING


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