Abstract—Defense and Aerospace environment is continuously striving to keep up with increasingly sophisticated Information Technology (IT) in order to remain effective in today’s dynamic and unpredictable threat environment. This makes IT one of the largest and fastest growing expenses of Defense. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent a year on IT projects. But, too many of those millions are wasted on costly mistakes. Systems that do not work properly, new components that are not compatible with old ones, trendy new applications that do not really satisfy defense needs or lost through poorly managed contracts. This paper investigates and compiles the effective strategies that aim to end exasperation with low returns and high cost of Information Technology acquisition for defense; it tries to show how to maximize value while reducing time and expenditure. Keywords—Iterative process, acquisition management, project management, software economics, requirement analysis. I. INTRODUCTION EFENSE and Aerospace sector had adopted waterfall standard, but they experience significant failure(estimates of about 70% of IT projects are long overdue or unusable), unfortunately the legacy of waterfall still confuses IT projects in Defense. The largest contribution to this failure is to attempt full requirements definition at early stage. In defense and aerospace projects, there is a long gap before these requirements are delivered. Our survey results agree with literature that on average 25% of the requirements change on IT projects. Thus, spending significant portion of time, budget and effort trying to define requirements to the maximum level is inappropriate and wasteful. The results of our survey showed that 45% of the features defined at the requirements analysis stage were useless. Figure 1 shows the graphical presentation of the survey results. Manuscript received October 14, 2005. Ahmet Denker is with the Electronics Engineering Department, Ankara University, Besevler, Ankara, 06100 Turkey (e-mail: denker@eng.ankara.edu.tr). Hakan Gürkan is with the Electronic Warfare Department, Turkish Airforce, Etimesgut, Ankara, 06100 Turkey (corresponding author to provide phone: +90-312-212 67 20 ext.1466; fax: +90-312-212 54 80; e-mail: hgurkan@science.ankara.edu.tr). 45% 13% 19% 16% 7% very useful fairly useful slightly useful useful useless Fig. 1 Utility of the requirements defined at the analysis stage II. WHY IT PROJECTS ARE DIFFERENT IT projects are different from other projects because they are domain dependent(Fig. 2). That’s, it is not sufficient to manage the project itself, but they also require the management domain level. When the domain is defense environment, the task is even more difficult to achieve. Why? • There is only one customer. • There is a different corporate culture. Fig. 2 IT projects are domain dependent There are many different types of approaches at domain, methodologies, and models utilized in application development, but all have a common basis in IT development that involve defined steps to include: project evaluation and planning, requirements development (analysis and specification) and definitions, system design, program design, program implementation (coding), unit testing, integration testing, system testing (verification and validation), system delivery (implementation) and system maintenance, similar to Iterative Way to Acquire Information Technology for Defense and Aerospace Ahmet Denker, and Hakan Gürkan D DOMAIN DEFENSE ENVIRONMENT IT PROJECTS World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Vol:1, No:9, 2007 456 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 1(9) 2007 scholar.waset.org/1307-6892/13188 International Science Index, Humanities and Social Sciences Vol:1, No:9, 2007 waset.org/Publication/13188