  Observatories are complex scientific and technical institutions serving
diverse users and purposes. Their telescopes, instruments, software, and human
resources engage in interwoven workflows over a broad range of timescales.
These workflows have been tuned to be responsive to concepts of observatory
operations that were applicable when various assets were commissioned, years or
decades in the past. The astronomical community is entering an era of rapid
change increasingly characterized by large time domain surveys, robotic
telescopes and automated infrastructures, and - most significantly - of
operating modes and scientific consortia that span our individual facilities,
joining them into complex network entities.
  Observatories must adapt and numerous initiatives are in progress that focus
on redesigning individual components out of the astronomical toolkit. New
instrumentation is both more capable and more complex than ever, and even
simple instruments may have powerful observation scripting capabilities. Remote
and queue observing modes are now widespread. Data archives are becoming
ubiquitous. Virtual observatory standards and protocols and astroinformatics
data-mining techniques layered on these are areas of active development.
Indeed, new large-aperture ground-based telescopes may be as expensive as space
missions and have similarly formal project management processes and large data
management requirements.
  This piecewise approach is not enough. Whatever challenges of funding or
politics facing the national and international astronomical communities it will
be more efficient - scientifically as well as in the usual figures of merit of
cost, schedule, performance, and risks - to explicitly address the systems
engineering of the astronomical community as a whole.
