1 Paper #179 Towards Effective System Life Cycle Management – Research on the relationships between System Architecture, Organizational and Process Structures

In an increasingly dynamic world, an enterprise needs to be flexible in how it organizes for managing a system through its life cycle. This paper focuses on the following two concerns of an engineering firm/enterprise and more specifically the system developer/integrator: How shall the system architecture be defined so that it enables the best possible transition through the system’s life cycle? Does the enterprise need to adapt its organization to the system architecture and if so, does the need for adaptation change during the life cycle? The origin of the research presented in this paper is the common statement that “the organizational structure shall mirror the product structure”. With the objective to validate this statement, research was conducted which eventually provided a more complex, but insightful, description of the relationship. This paper presents the elaboration of the problem description and recommendations for further research