INCOSE San Diego
June 2017 Newsletter
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From the President
If you haven’t made it to an INCOSE San Diego Chapter dinner meeting lately, I encourage you to join us in our new venue of Filippi’s Kearny Mesa. Good food, nice conference room, great opportunity to network with fellow systems engineers in the area.
So what did I mean in our last Newsletter about Systems Engineering being “evolution in action”, to steal the phrase from an entirely different context in the Niven & Pournelle novel Oath of Fealty? I mean simply that as we are in the business of engineering solutions to increasingly complex systems, with an ever-increasing emphasis for those systems themselves to be extensible, adaptable, scalable, agile, and all those other evolutionary-type “ilities”, that our jobs therefore entail aspects of evolution. That the systems we build and the methodologies we employ must embrace it. And therefore that we ourselves must continue to evolve our knowledge, experience, and abilities to keep pace with the latest technologies required to enable our systems to handle the changing world in which they operate. A world of changing threats, changing challenges, changing technologies, changing funding. If we don’t change to address those changes, then we fail.
This evolution of Systems Engineering itself is manifest in the current attempts – not completely satisfying, yet – to infuse agile software engineering methods into the systems and system-of-systems engineering methods we use to manage such enterprises. How to allow the solution to evolve as the agile methodology is applied in sprints without suffering the many ill effects of requirements creep and architectural design overload that has so far been inevitable in such attempts? I do not have the answer to that; I do know it’s not going to be quite whatever anyone currently thinks it will be. It, the systems engineering methodology, will have to evolve.
And the fun part is, we will be a part of that evolution. If we keep our eyes open to see it and our minds open enough to allow it, to abandon our older ways and apply the new emergent methods as they mature.
That, indeed, is evolution in action. We should embrace it.
Still to come: Systems of Systems Engineering, Interoperability Engineering, Big Systems Engineering –Are they the same thing? How do they relate? Where do they differ? How does evolution in action apply to them?
I hope to see you at our next dinner meeting, our upcoming STEM celebration event, or our fall Mini-conference.
Cheers,
- Richard Bryson
Systems Engineering: Think of it as evolution in action.
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Old and New
Alan D. Harding, alan.harding@incose.org
Most of the time, we are talking about the future – the INCOSE Systems Engineering Vision 2025, our vision, and mission, and how we are addressing our strategic objectives. That is great and the right thing to do, but in this newsletter, I wanted to look back and highlight some of the world-class publication content that every individual member and CAB employee can access. I have picked one example “gem” from each source to illustrate what you might find. All these links work when you are logged into Connect at www.incose.org.
The INCOSE International Symposium library holds papers on all symposia dating back to Chattanooga, US-TN, in 1991. It contains a wealth of insight, and diverse views on systems topics. International Symposium papers do not just reflect the orthodox view of systems approaches; you will often find thought-provoking material that is relevant years later.
- The example I have picked is Marvin Talbott’s 1993 paper on “Why Systems Fail” – a practical view of seven underlying principles that contribute to numerous generic system failures. Systems Engineering is INCOSE’s technical journal. Authors publish peer-reviewed papers in both themed and open issues up to six times a year by our partners Wiley under the editorship of Oli de Weck. Systems Engineering’s first publication was in 1998.
- Eric Honour’s 1998 article on the History of INCOSE, which takes us, all the way back to the origins of the society and filled in a lot of background, was new to me. INSIGHT is the INCOSE Practitioners Magazine, first published in 1993 and publishes four times a year. Bill Miller edits INSIGHT. For me the strength of INSIGHT is its themed issues, which each provides a powerful and attractive resource for a key systems topic.
- Showing open partiality I am using the Oct 2016 issue as my example as it focussed on Systems of Systems a subject close to my heart and a vital part of addressing today’s systems challenges. This special edition includes 16 articles from authors in all three INCOSE sectors and multiple application domains and is an excellent resource for practitioners and academics alike. JET – The Journal of Enterprise Transformation is a quarterly publication designed to provide a forum for original articles on trends, new findings, and ongoing research (both theory and application) related to enterprise transformation. Rahul C. Basole serves as the Editor-in-Chief for JET, published by Taylor & Francis. JET first published in 2011.
- Bill Rouse’s 2011 article on “Necessary Competencies for Transforming an Enterprise”is well worth a read as it uses case studies to consider the complexities of transforming today’s enterprises. INCOSE uses webinars to share information about systems engineering and about INCOSE, and has established a significant Library of recorded webinars available to members. The main webinar series started in 2008 and there are almost 100 webinars available – in fact, our 100th webinar is days away, on June 19th!
- This milestone webinar addresses “Integrating Program Management and Systems Engineering” and the new book on the subject that is a product of INCOSE’s collaboration with MIT and PMI. The webinar library also includes webinars from INCOSE working groups, with over 70 webinars on topics including MBSE, SOSE, and Agile systems engineering.
I would encourage all members to spend some time to explore these resources, see what you find, and highlight any hidden gems you find – why not tweet about it or post to INCOSE’s Facebook page to tell others? Be sure to tag INCOSE - @incose _org and/or me, @incosepres!
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Annual San Diego STEM Awards Event
Your San Diego INCOSE chapter directors are busy planning for our 2017 STEM Awards event, tentatively planned for the last Sunday in Sept or a Sunday in early October. Look for email announcements. For a change of pace, we will be relocating it from the USS Midway Museum to a new location: please stay tuned for where it will be! Thank you!
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Upcoming Events
- Chapter Meeting, July 12th, 2017
- Topic:
- Systems of Systems in Every Endeavor: Cybersecurity, IoT, Safe and Smart Cities, Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems
- INCOSE Mini Conference, Nov 4th, 2017
- Topics:
- System Engineering of Interoperability
- Big Data Challenges
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Did you know…?
INCOSE San Diego is now accepting articles from members for presentation in the quarterly newsletter. Each newsletter will present one article, with the goal being to provide deeper understanding of specific S.E. topics for our readers. To apply to have your topic in the newsletter, please submit your
proposed article (one page in length or less) to both the Chapter President and the VP of Administration. Thank you.
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 2017 INCOSE San Diego Board Contacts
Questions or suggestions? Please feel free to contact any of the 2016 board members at the following email addresses:
Richard Bryson, President
richard.alan.bryson@gmail.com
Ted Mulder, President-Elect
ted.mulder@ngc.com
Ray Madachy, Past President
madachy@ieee.org
Abbas Rostami, Treasurer
abbas.rostami@gmail.com
Jack Turner, Ch. Development
jack.l.turner@xsitellc.com
James Meng, VP of Tech Development
mengjc@mit.edu
Mark Halverson, Secretary
mark.halverson@ngc.com
Andy von Stauffenberg, VP of Admin & Newsletter
avs@vstarsystems.com
Jim Gottfried, 2-year Director
gottjim@roadrunner.com
Mojgan Demore, 1-year Director
Mojgan.DeMore@ga-asi.com
Greg Bulla, Website
gbulla@yahoo.com
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