About

Hello, my name is Greg Bulla and I am happy to serve you as President of the INCOSE San Diego chapter in 2020. I am a software systems engineer for SAIC with approximately 20 years combined software and systems-engineering experience. I have served on the INCOSE San Diego board for five years. I would like to thank the 2020 INCOSE San Diego board for stepping up and volunteering to help continue to make us a world-class organization.

This is a strong time for our chapter. We received Platinum status in 2018, a feat we expect to repeat for 2019 (final awards are pending). Our chapter was awarded Outstanding Chapter in 2018 out of approximately 70 chapters worldwide. Local membership now exceeds 250 members, up from 175 only two years ago. We continue to host 6-7 chapter presentations per year covering a broad range of SE topics, including Cloud, Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), and DevOps. Our yearly socials, tutorials, STEM event, and Mini-Conference also continue to be popular.

San Diego enjoys a strong technical and systems engineering community. Diverse and world-class, its companies and organizations cover technical areas ranging from medical science to defense, from telecommunications to start ups.

In addition to its diversity, our systems engineering community must also be collaborative. Systems engineers must work together by sharing ideas, knowledge and training. This is one of the most efficient means of learning – real world experiences and lessons learned. Working together helps us solve common engineering challenges, learn new techniques, and to promote Systems Engineering as a separate interdisciplinary field.

This is part of INCOSE’s mission statement, to facilitate learning, communication and collaboration, and to act as the ‘glue’ between the various engineering fields, domains, and organizations.

Accordingly, San Diego chapter events are open to all (discounts apply for INCOSE members). Our website is also public and completely accessible, and we highly encourage everyone to download and view our past presentations and webcasts. We also promote the next generation of engineers and scientists by fundraising and awarding yearly STEM grants to local schools.

But systems engineering is also dynamic. The rise of Agile development, MBSE, and DevOps continue to redefine the SE landscape. Time to market/customer is shorter, with long development cycles now the exception rather than the rule. Some programs are experimenting with completely replacing requirements specifications, a tenet of systems engineering, with simpler user stories. MBSE continues to move system design away from documents to a computer model format. How are we as systems engineers evolving to meet these demands? And what technical skills will we need to thoroughly understand these technologies and successfully steer our programs?

Please join us at one of our many 2020 events, and also consider becoming actively involved in supporting the chapter by making a presentation or volunteering. For more information on such opportunities and to make suggestions on improving our chapter, please free to contact me or any of the board members. Thank you.

Greg Bulla,

San Diego Chapter President 2020