INCOSE at 20: New Domains, New People

The International Council on Systems Engineering

(www.incose.org) held its 20th annual symposium in

Chicago this July, celebrating an organization and a

profession that are growing at a steady rate as new areas

of product and practice are exposed to the power of

systems engineering.

Since 1991, when the first symposium was held in

Chattanooga, TN, attended by just over 100

representatives from the defense/aerospace industry,

government agencies, and academia, INCOSE (then

NCOSE) has grown into a vibrantly international and

impressively diverse group. Members represent a range

of industries from defense to finance and medicine.

That diversity was highlighted at this year’s symposium,

when INCOSE’s most prestigious award, INCOSE

Pioneer, was presented to Julian Goldman, MD. The

citation read:

“For demonstrated extraordinary leadership in the

advancement of the state-of-the-art and practice

of systems engineering in the biomedical and

healthcare fields. Through his pioneering work, Dr.

Goldman has shown that breakthrough

improvements in patient safety can be achieved

by bringing together individuals and groups from

the commercial, non-profit, education, and

government sectors to focus on ‘the system of

interest.’ The most impressive legacy of his work

is in hearts and smiles of living, breathing patients,

who, without his trailblazing efforts, might not be

here today.”

The award of this honor—based on uniquely applying the

engineering of systems to outcomes enhancing society—

not to an engineer, but to a physician, is a milestone for

INCOSE. Goldman is the founding director of the

Program on Medical Device Interoperability at the Center

for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology,

and his award underscores the impact of systems

engineering in new domains of practice.

The growth of INCOSE in every dimension, mirrored in the

number of new faces and the energy within the technical

working groups, provides evidence that the field of

systems engineering is expanding to meet the challenges

of an ever more complex set of societal needs.

MIT’s System Design and Management Program (SDM)

has drawn much of its material for the systems

engineering core course from the technical community in

INCOSE, including the course text, which is the INCOSE

Systems Engineering Handbook. This year, the

partnership between SDM and INCOSE will expand

further with the planned establishment of an MIT student

chapter under the sponsorship of INCOSE’s New

England chapter. And, next fall, SDM will welcome

Goldman as keynote speaker at its annual systems

thinking conference.

This post was reprinted from the Fall issue of the SDM Pulse

industry newsletter.