Abstract
Accelerating changes in technology and society pose fundamental challenges to the management of complex, hierarchical organizations like the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). For the DoD, the stakes are especially high, as the security of the nation depends on our success in tackling these complex challenges, like managing asymmetric warfare, anticipating digital attacks, coordinating complex acquisition processes, optimizing global supply chains, and rethinking scientific and technological superiority. The DoD needs ways to understand and meet these new, forward-facing challenges. The intersection of management sciences and information sciences offers a set of principles and practices to provide guidance.
The management the DoD’s research and development (R&D) is especially key to the security of the nation as advances and supremacy in R&D have been a bulwark for many decades, and the country has invested accordingly. But just investing more funds in R&D alone will not achieve the needed gains in security. R&D advances need to be accompanied by a culture of innovation, which, in turn, requires advances at the frontiers of management science and information science. The accelerating rates of change associated with the current digital era require equally rapidly evolving capabilities for organizations and institutions, yet most of the military-industrial complex has only been advancing in small, incremental ways.