The health and well-being, and today the very survival, of an enterprise depend on its ability to respond and adapt in timely, innovative, and effective manners. The relatively static behaviors of the past have been changed unalterably by the explosion of telecommunication and information technologies/capabilities as typified through the emergence of the World-Wide Web (W3). Enterprises are learning to adapt to the challenges of the new global business and national security environment by exploiting the same capabilities that are driving the dynamic environment, telecommunications and IT. In essence, information and the knowledge derived therefrom have emerged as key assets of the enterprise in responding and adapting to the demands of the global environment.

The experiences over the past decade for a wide variety of enterprises, including both governmental and commercial entities, are reflected by more failures than successes in embracing successful strategies and solutions for creating, engineering, and evolving the knowledge system that serves the enterprise most effectively. Certainly, problems have arisen through failures of leadership and management, who have been unable to break the static behaviors and narrow organizational views that served them well in the past. On the other hand, engineers, given responsibility for exploiting information technologies to meet the information needs of leadership and management for knowledgeable decision making, have found the challenges of dealing with the complex event-driven environments and the complex array of enterprise stakeholders and systems vastly more difficult than the systems engineering problems of the past.