Software Engineering Institute

Complexity and change pervade today's organizations. Organizational and technology components that must work together may be created, managed, and maintained by different entities. Net-centric operations and service-oriented architectures will push this trend further, increasing the layers of people, processes, and systems. Existing analysis mechanisms do not provide a way to (1) focus on challenges arising from integrating multiple systems, (2) consider architecture tradeoffs carrying impacts beyond a single system, and (3) consider the linkage of technology to critical organizational functions. In response, a team at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) built an analysis framework to evaluate the quality of the linkage among roles, dependencies, constraints, and risks for critical technology capabilities in the face of change. 

The Survivability Analysis Framework (SAF), a structured view of people, process, and technology, was developed to help organizations analyze and understand stresses and gaps to survivability for operational and proposed business processes. The SAF is designed to

• identify potential problems with existing or near-term interoperations among components within today's network environments
• highlight the impact on survivability as constrained interoperation moves to more dynamic connectivity
• increase assurance that mission threads can survive in the presence of stress and possible failure