A Stakeholder-Based Analysis of the Benefits of Network Enabled Capability

Abstract

Realisation of the benefits sought from Network Enabled Capability (NEC) requires industry and UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) to work effectively together with a shared vision. Earlier studies have revealed disparate understandings of the NEC concept and a lack of agreement on its definition. Furthermore, although the benefits of NEC have been intuitively recognised, it is not clear that these benefits have been metricated in a fashion suitable to justify the investment needed in research and development for their realisation. This paper reports on a workshop involving military users and industrial systems engineers that sought to identify and prioritise the benefits of NEC through which NEC development may be assessed. It also draws on the outcomes of other interactive workshops on the perception of NEC by stakeholders organised within the framework of NECTISE research programme. The motivation for this paper is to disseminate NEC benefits on which there is industry and user consensus to encourage the generation of meaningful measurements of NEC value in the future. The outcomes have revealed considerable coherence between the stakeholder groups in recognition and priority of the benefits, although these benefits were all of an operational (military) nature. This indicates a good prospect for industry engagement in the NEC aspiration and metrics are now needed to measure the effectiveness of using NEC in different contexts such as military and industry. The benefits are also included in the impact of NEC on the systems engineering discipline, but in order to achieve them systems engineering may be required to change or adapt new practices.