Decision-making stakeholders and solution-implementing engineers know that either there is a crisis in modern engineering or that widely held expectations are overly optimistic for how quickly complex systems can be acquired.

We believe there is a crisis in modern engineering. We choose to reject the possibility that systems cannot be acquired in the timeframes that experts forecast.

We present studies and anecdotes which indicate the extent that inefficiencies such as “workers in motion waste” and “data in motion waste” are jeopardizing worldwide business endeavors.

The impacts of the engineering crisis include: long schedule overruns, high costs, and violated requirements. When suppliers have met the predicted schedules, budgets, and requirements, often they have done so only by sacrificing key capabilities.

We argue that adoption of a digital thread platform offers stakeholders and engineers the hope for acquiring systems on schedule and under budget which exhibit all required capabilities at all key parameters of performance.

A digital thread platform is a system which offers the capability of digital thread creation, curation, and visualization and analytics.

A “digital thread” is a mathematically formal graph composed of the numerous engineering artifacts and the structural, semantic, and provenance relationships between these artifacts. A business-useful digital thread is one that is open, dynamic, scalable, secure, and analytical.

We define what it means to be open, dynamic, scalable, secure, and analytical.

We illustrate with examples how organizations that adopt a digital thread platform can realize dramatic improvements in schedule, cost, and capability acquisition.