Lessons Learned from Constructing a Digital Thread

In order to realize the goals of the United States (US) Department of Defense (DoD) Digital Engineering Strategy, digital threads need to be defined and constructed to exchange data to support engineering activities. Practitioners of digital engineering are challenged with sharing relevant information between tools in a way that supports decision making or an engineering activity. Tool integrators must take into account the stakeholders' needs and how the digital thread changes over the system lifecycle. In this work, we describe the program risk management and system architecture digital thread and the lessons learned from researching, prototyping, and applying this digital thread. We conclude each lesson learned with suggestions of how the lesson learned could be applied to constructing new digital threads.