Transforming Systems Engineering, Product Management, and Cybersecurity Through Five Strategic Imperatives
Suzette Johnson (Northrop Grumman) & Robin Yeman (Leidos)
As AI-enabled cyber-physical systems become central to mission execution, the pace of required adaptation has outstripped the capacity of traditional development approaches. In this paper, Dr. Suzette Johnson and Dr. Robin Yeman argue that organizations must stop treating AI as a conventional software tool and begin recognizing it as a cybernetic partner—one that perceives, adapts, and responds through continuous feedback. The gap between technological capability and organizational readiness, they contend, is now the most significant risk facing modern enterprises.
To close that gap, Johnson and Yeman present five integrated strategic imperatives: workforce transformation and AI fluency, sociotechnical integration into the operating model, risk management for autonomous physical assets, organizational preparedness through human readiness levels, and competitive advantage through governed human-machine interaction. Together, these imperatives provide a practical roadmap for moving beyond isolated AI pilots toward resilient, enterprise-scale deployment.
This paper is part of the Spring 2026 Enterprise Technology Leadership Journal, a collection of guidance papers from IT Revolution authors and past presenters at the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit.
Dr. Suzette Johnson is an award-winning author who has spent most of her career in the aerospace defense industry working for Northrop Grumman Corporation. Suzette was the enterprise Lean/Agile transformation lead. In this role, she launched the Northrop Grumman Agile Community of Practice and the Lean/Agile Center of Excellence. She has supported over a hundred enterprise, government, and DoD transitions to and the maturation of Lean-Agile principles and engineering development practices. She has also trained and coached over four thousand individuals on Lean/Agile principles and practices and delivered more than one hundred presentations on Lean/Agile at conferences both nationally and abroad. Her current role is as Northrop Grumman Fellow and Technical Fellow Emeritus, where she continues to actively drive the adoption of Lean/Agile principles with leadership at the portfolio levels and within cyber-physical solutions, specifically within the space sector. As a mentor, coach, and leader, she launched the Women in Computing, Johns Hopkins University Chapter; the Women in Leadership Development program; the Northrop Grumman Lean-Agile Center of Excellence; and the NDIA ADAPT (Agile Delivery for Agencies, Programs, and Teams) working group. She received a Doctorate of Management at the University of Maryland with a dissertation focused on investigating the impact of leadership styles on software project outcomes in traditional and Agile engineering environments. She am also a Certified Agile Enterprise Coach and Scaled Agile Program Consultant/SPCT
Robin Yeman has spent twenty-six years working at Lockheed Martin as a senior technical fellow building large systems including everything from submarines to satellites. Robin lead the Agile community of practice supporting a workforce of 120,000 people. Her initial experience with Lean practices began in the late 90’s. In 2002 shen had the opportunity to lead her first Agile program with multiple scrum teams. After she had a couple months of experience, she was hooked and never turned back. She both led and supported Agile Transformations for intelligence, federal, department of defense organizations over the next two decades and each one was more exciting and challenging than the last. In 2012 she had the opportunity to extend our Agile practices into DevOps which added extensive automation and tightened our feedback loops providing even larger results. Currently she is consulting for a range of Fortune 500 companies in highly regulated environments enabling them to achieve the same results we experienced at Lockheed Martin. She engages in everything from automotive, pharmaceuticals, and energy reimagining legacy to modern solutions using all of the tools in my toolbox including Agile, DevOps, Lean, Digital Engineering, Systems Theory, Design Thinking and more. Her goal is to make a positive impact for those around her. Robin is a continuous learner. Her education includes a Bachelor's Degree from Syracuse Univision in Computer Information Systems, a Master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Software Engineering, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in Systems Engineering at Colorado State University, where she is working on my contribution to demonstrate empirical data of the benefits of implementing Agile and DevOps for safety critical cyber-physical systems.
