Authority, integration, and decision rights: a CCM Institute perspective on emerging acquisition reform

From accountability without authority to authority with ownership

The recently published Breaking Defense paper argues that for more than 50 years, acquisition professionals have been held accountable for outcomes without meaningful decision rights. This mismatch between responsibility and authority strongly aligns with CCM Institute research across public and private sectors:

1. Authority within acquisition and contracting systems is typically fragmented across requirements, budgeting, legal, and procurement functions. This creates friction, delay, and risk-averse behaviour.
2. The growing emphasis on aligning responsibility with genuine authority reflects a core contract management insight - ownership is essential for performance.
3. In commercial settings, authority without decision rights almost always produces compliance-driven behavior detached from outcomes.
4. For contract practitioners, the governance need is clear: define who decides, when they decide, and on what data and policy basis, not merely who is accountable when things go wrong.

The commercial integrator as a spectrum of authority

The Institute’s work points to the need for a new commercial operating model, enabled by integrated technologies and centered on the concept of the commercial integrator. This is not a single job description but a continuum of authority that scales with complexity, risk, and consequence.

In the context of defence acquisition reform, the move toward Portfolio Acquisition Executives and more empowered Program Managers effectively represents integrator roles at scale - roles designed to trade schedule, performance, cost, and risk in service of mission outcomes. To be both efficient and effective, these transactional activities must operate within a clearly defined ‘permissions framework’, supported by structured decision trees and guides.

From a CCM Institute perspective, integrators typically operate at three levels:

1. Facilitator (lower authority): orchestrates information, aligns stakeholders, escalates decisions.
2. Decision Agent (moderate authority): balances competing objectives within defined boundaries.
3. Delegated Authority (high authority): exercises powers traditionally reserved for central governance. These may potentially be encoded in systems, AI, or contractual mechanisms.

This framing has practical implications. Coordination authority must be distinguished from decision authority, and structured delegation frameworks must clearly define what can be decided, under what conditions, and with what data and constraints.

Policy vs execution: making authority work in practice

The Breaking Defense paper highlights how rigid policy constructs, particularly detailed, static requirements, create bottlenecks by diffusing decision authority. CCM Institute research shows the same pattern across industries: policy aims for predictability and control, while execution demands speed and adaptability.

The commercial integrator operates at this junction, translating policy intent into real-time operational decisions. Success depends on explicit decision-rights matrices embedded in policy, setting thresholds, escalation triggers, tolerances, and evidence requirements that allow authority to be exercised confidently rather than defensively.

The missing constraint: fiscal authority and the limits of decision rights

Budget authority and funding flexibility is a critical dimension of acquisition reform which remains underdeveloped. Even where contracting and program decision rights are being clarified and expanded, acquisition teams continue to operate within rigid fiscal constraints that fundamentally limit what they can decide. Appropriations law, colour-of-money rules, obligation timelines, reprogramming thresholds, and the realities of Continuing Resolutions impose hard boundaries that no internal governance reform can overcome.

In practical terms, acquisition leaders are increasingly asked to behave like business owners while operating with the financial discretion of custodians. Authority over requirements, contracting strategy, and risk trade-offs may be expanding, but authority over timing, capital allocation, and investment sequencing largely is not. This creates a structural tension at the heart of reform. Accountability is pushed downward and outward, while funding authority remains centralized, episodic, and politically mediated. The system attempts to build bridges - integrated teams, empowered roles, adaptive contracts - but does not control the toll booths that determine whether action can occur at all.

From a CCM Institute perspective, this asymmetry matters. Until fiscal governance evolves to allow controlled, delegated flexibility within congressional guardrails, acquisition reform will remain constrained not by operational capability, but by what teams are legally permitted to fund at the moment decisions are required.

Data and systems as enablers of delegated authority

Another implicit theme in acquisition reform is the role of data in enabling authority. Empowered decision agents cannot operate without timely, accurate, shared information.

CCM Institute research consistently shows that:

1. Authority without visibility is either paralysed or dangerous.
2. AI-enabled systems and smart contractual mechanisms can encode delegated authority, but only where data quality and auditability are assured.
3. Delegated authority requires integrated governance covering data standards, real-time reporting, role-based permissions, and traceability.

In defence acquisition, as in commercial contracting, the limitations of current information systems and fragmented data environments remain a major barrier to progress. This equally applies to many in the supply base, where investment in contracting technology has been limited and is often constrained by the risk aversion and conservatism of public sector procurement rules.

Risks and guardrails

The Institute’s work also highlights the risks of poorly designed authority models:

• Over-delegation without bounds can undermine strategic coherence.
• Narrow performance metrics distort behaviour.
• Powerful integrators without transparency create hidden systemic risks.

Effective models therefore pair authority with guardrails, transparency, and shared ownership, echoing emerging DoD approaches that deliberately couple operators with acquisition professionals.

Conclusion

The defence acquisition reform agenda provides a powerful lens through which to refine thinking on authority, integration, and decision rights. The CCM Institute perspective reinforces a central lesson: authority aligned with accountability must include access to decision-quality data and, critically, meaningful financial discretion. Added to this, improvements must take account of the supply base. Successful contracts and outcomes are always bi-lateral, mostly multi-lateral. Thinking and policy must embrace this reality and become inclusive of shared interests.

Many acquisition teams already think and act commercially. The unresolved question is whether fiscal governance models will evolve so that empowered decision makers can actually decide. Until then, reform will improve execution at the margins while leaving the core constraint intact.