Old Dogs and New Tricks...

As my INCOSE President tenure comes to an end, it prompts a number of thoughts about the systems culture, many of which are related to systems education. As you know, my 'day job' is running the MIT System Design and Management Program, which prepares experienced technical professionals to take leadership positions in system and product development environments. One of they key developments profoundly needed by the systems engineering profession and advanced through a collaboration between INCOSE and the Object Management Group (OMG) is the concept of Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), which helps users and designers deal with the ever-growing complexity of systems and to explore expected system behaviors in advance of committing to a single design option. Using MBSE requires some ability to think at the 'meta' (abstract/conceptual) level, and some familiarity with SySML notation, but greatly enhances early design capabilities, and allows many more permutations of system design to be explored before one is selected. So what's the problem?

Some of our 'grey beard' senior systems engineers are not comfortable with the new methodology, and are not encouraging its use on 'their' projects--we seem to have created a systems generation gap. While the use of model based systems engineering methods is still developing, results that INCOSE and OMG modelers have achieved so far point to great value in the methodology, and, frankly, without it, we will likely be slowed in design and development of new systems, which we can ill afford. In the system design and management curriculum at MIT, we have added model based development methods to two core courses. From my recent INCOSE experience, it seems obvious that industry needs to offer (in house) or sponsor attendance (externally) to some courses on MBSE to bring the 'old dogs' into the present, and allow the respected grey beards to lead in the MBSE revolution, rather than resist it.