Subsequent to the Klinger-Cohen Act, architecting became a pervasive activity in all Government organizations, and, as would be expected, problems arose almost immediately. Initial meetings with VSO’s developers (Expand, Inc.) and Government program and technical managers (AFRL and USAF Electronic Systems Center) identified three important concerns with the existing state-of-the-art in architecting methodology:

It takes too much effort to develop an architecture and there are not enough resources available to build a robust architecture.

The time required to modify an existing architecture is too long to satisfy the requirements
of real-time decision makers.

The architectures being developed lack the fidelity needed to obtain operationally
predictive results. This is due, in large part, to the poor interface between the participants in
the architecting effort: subject-matter experts, who understand systems and operations, but not software, and the software developers, who understand software, but not systems and operations. Additionally, the architecting methodologies were generally not based upon principles that were mathematically sound, or at least had not been demonstrated to be so.

Expand, Inc. was challenged by the Government to:
(a) reduce the development time by 50%;
(b) reduce the time required to create a variant of an architecture by 75%; and
(c) use a proven, mathematically well-founded methodology that would dramatically
shift architecting away from the software engineer and to the subject-matter expert.