ABSTRACT
Introduction: The Political Challenge The process of systems architecting requires two things above all others — value judgments by the client and technical choices by the architect. The political process is the way that the general public, when it is the end client, expresses its value judgments. High-tech, high-budget, high-visibility, publicly supported programs are therefore far more than engineering challenges; they are political challenges of the rst magnitude. A program may have the technological potential of producing the most revolutionary weapon system since gunpowder, elegantly engineered and technologically superb, but if it is to have any real life-expectancy or even birth, its managers must take its political element as seriously as any other element. It is not only possible but likely that the political process will not only drive such design factors as safety, security, producibility, quantity, and reliability, but may even inuence the choice of technologies to be employed.† The bottom line is:
If the politics don’t fly, the system never will.
