The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré, 1865 (public domain)
The Hebrew Scriptures recount the story of an over-ambitious (and poorly engineered) “tower with its top in the heavens,” which came to be known as the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9); the project was reportedly abandoned after a divine power caused the workers to begin speaking in a confusing array of languages. In Doré’s engraving of this event, I invite you to point out the systems engineer—I know who I would choose—and think about whether this ancient story may still be reflected in too many of our dialogues, and may be hampering our efforts to reach out into new domains of practice (not to mention confusing our key resources for the future, our young systems engineers). We have been investing substantial amounts of time and energy in an outreach to fresh application domains: commercial products, services, healthcare, public transit, to name just a subset, and finding that the profusion of new words, acronyms, and specialized jargon for systems engineering activities across these domains, and the lack of any “secret decoder ring,” may be the greatest barrier to our success.
During the first meetings of INCOSE’s Commercial Steering Board, participants from different commercial domains found that even though their enterprise processes were equivalent to those of systems engineering, they used different terminology from that used in the defense and aerospace fields; even worse, they found that terminology differed even across their own commercial subdomains and product types. It was difficult for them to discuss processes with each other, let alone with the core INCOSE membership! As we prepare for even more outreach effort into both new domains and different cultures, I would like to encourage an initiative—championed by several of our intellectual leaders, including INCOSE Fellow Jack Ring—to develop and validate a set of systems engineering ontologies for different domains of practice and cultures (an ontology can be defined as “a specification of a conceptualization”, and, ultimately, a cross-referenced schema for those who need to translate across those domains.
INCOSE has initiated a project under the Technical Director, Regina Griego, to engage the entire community in defining, demystifying, cross-referencing and documenting the terminology of systems engineering across domains. The System Design and Management (SDM) program at MIT has instituted graduate seminars for engineers with commercial experience to develop a taxonomy of what comprises a 'commercial' product or system, and will submit the results to the INCOSE Journal when complete. This is an opportunity to use some of our new collaborative mechanisms like our wiki pages to get maximum engagement from all of the broader systems community and all domains, and I invite you to join me in the dialogue as it develops. In that way, we can all contribute to further socializing the profession of systems engineering into new frontiers, and may even help to interest a broader population of our youth to think about systems engineering.
Adapted from a 2009 column in INSIGHT, the INCOSE newsletter.
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