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.

A Systems Tower of Babel?

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.

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.

Systems: Philosophical and Intellectual Viewpoints

This is the start of what I hope will be an active dialog on systems engineering, engineering education, professional organizations and trends in the very broad world of systems. I post from several 'identities', or viewpoints:

• I am the current President (and a 15-year member) of the International Council on Systems Engineering--this is an organization with a rich systems culture, composed of about 7,000 members in 26 countries, and INCOSE provides a window into the evolving systems engineering world and the latest methods and practices.
  
  
• Senior Lecturer, MIT Engineering Systems Division--MIT ESD is an academic community engaged in systems research in a context of broader intellectual boundaries, combining engineering, the social sciences and management science to tackle some of the biggest challenges in our society--it is an exciting and stimulating place to explore the future of systems and systems methodologies.
  
  
• Director, Systems Design and Management program at MIT, a career compatible master's program offered jointly by the MIT School of Engineering ang the Sloan School of Management. Our average student is in their 30s, with 8-10+ years of experience, and it is a privilege to teach and provide a temporary home for bright, mid-career professionals as they soak in the intellectual soup of MIT.

These viewpoints and experiences stimulate a broad range of interests, ideas and musings about the future of systems and the methods and processes used to understand and interact with them in all their forms.

Join me and become an active voice in the systems conversation!