Impacts and Opportunities for Engineering in the Era of Cloud Computing Systems

Systems engineering outcomes depend on how well networks of people collaborateto formulate and resolve evolving networks of decisions. Teams underperform today due to alack of support for collaborative, networked decision making. We propose an approach toimproving the performance of such teams with technology to support social construction of andcoordination through social decision networks (SDNs). An SDN models a set of decisionslinked by relationships, the association of individuals with decisions, and social links necessaryfor effectively making shared and coupled decisions. Our results and contributions include aprecise model of SDNs, a Web 2.0 system enabling groups of people to develop and use SDNmodels, tools for inferring required social networks from decision networks and participantassociations, and tools for network analysis, e.g., of modularity in decision and inferred socialnetworks. We are conducting studies with external partners to develop and evaluate thisapproach. Keywords-Decision networks, Social networks, Design I. PROBLEM AND MOTIVATIONIn software and software-intensive systems engineering, networks of people coordinate toformulate and resolve networks of decisions, in dynamic environments, to achieve goals.Examples of such decisions include what architectures to use, features to provide, languages touse, bugs to fix. Systems are products of collaborative decision making by teams of people.Problems occur when teams do not clearly identify important decisions and relationships amongthem, and when they do not coordinate adequately to ensure that shared and related decisionsare made well [1]–[3].