The Systems Engineering (SE) discipline has grown significantly over the past few decades thanks to the efforts of its practitioners, champions, organizations that practice SE, INCOSE (the international professional body for SE), and other professional bodies. SE has matured reasonably well, but is yet to establish a clear identity – what ‘exactly’ it is, what value it brings, what makes it different from other disciplines, etc. Often, SE seems to be a confusion:
There are observers from outside deciding whether to get in or not. Some of them embrace SE enthusiastically, while others declare there is nothing new in SE and hence decide to stay away.
Among those actively engaged in SE, some use SE vocabulary imprecisely and create confusion for themselves and others.
Whether one acknowledges it or not, the discipline of SE is facing an identity crisis that will not just go away on its own - it needs to be acknowledged, understood, and addressed. SE needs an identity to move ahead and thereby contribute to the successful development of various modern complex systems.
In this article we try to unravel this SE identity crisis. We shall address various aspects of it later in our upcoming blog articles.
A Twofold Crisis
The words ‘systems’ and ‘Engineering’ are commonly used by everyone. We are familiar with various kinds of ‘systems’, and ‘Engineering’ is commonly acknowledged to be a field of study, profession, or the act of intentionally creating something. When these two words come together however, it does not sound anything unique or path breaking! But take a look at word pairs such as ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI), ‘machine learning’ (ML), ‘big data’ (BD), and so on. There is novelty and excitement associated with these word pairs that is not noticed in the individual words. More importantly, they have established a strong, clear identity for themselves. So much so, that it is difficult to keep gate crashers away – i.e., people who continue to do what they always do, but want to identify it with AI / ML / BD. It is quite the opposite with SE in many cases – where people who find success with SE, tend to give credit to other disciplines!
In 1998, when KS was primed by the idea of setting up a Center focusing on SE at IIT Bombay, he searched the Central Library at IIT Bombay and was pleased to find a book on “Systems Engineering”. When the book arrived at his table however, the contents were a surprise. It was fully about Avionics, and contained not a word on topics that he was told or he had thought SE was about! About a decade later, DH attended his first international SE conference. He would choose to attend a presentation (out of multiple parallel tracks) based on its promising SE related title, but would then wonder why this was even included in a peer-reviewed SE conference! This situation continues to exist. You will still find people writing, presenting, and talking about SE that could contradict your own understanding of SE, making you wonder what SE is really about. In some cases, you may even wonder if they know what SE really is! If you are vulnerable, you may end up being gaslighted into believing that you do not know what SE really is!
So - on one side there is confusion about what SE is and on the other side, this confusion is often not clarified but rather inflated by those who are on the side of SE! These situations hamper the growth, acceptance, and adoption of the SE discipline.
We see this happening both in academia and in industry - it is a twofold crisis that SE is facing. For any engineering discipline and for SE in particular, a cordial give-and-take relationship between the two is essential. SE is a discipline that evolved in the industry, and it needs the support of academia to flourish. But SE is often caught in the middle.
Identity Crisis in Academia
One of the signs of maturity of a discipline is the strength of its presence in undergraduate and graduate programs, and active research in academic settings.
A new area usually takes shape in an existing department or college. It announces its birth by finding expression in existing academic programmes as elective courses, etc. It grows in stature through faculty-led research. One of two things can happen:
Its presence in existing academic programmes can increase, finally justifying a separate identity for itself - a new academic program, a new department or a Center in an existing department. Aerospace grew out of Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science grew out of Electrical Engineering, and so on.
Its presence in existing academic programs can continue to stay at a low level indicating it has no independent identity.
Which of the two happens is clearly dependent on industry HR needs (and thereby on the job market) and the potential for academic research (which depends on the funding it can attract from various sources).
There are a number of graduate (Masters level and Doctorate) programs in SE and a few undergraduate (Bachelors level) programmes offered around the world. Most of these are offered in the US while a few are offered in countries such as Israel, China, UK, Czech Republic, Germany, Norway, Dominican Republic, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Peru, Singapore, Switzerland, Romania, Columbia, UAE, Venezuela, Brazil, Nigeria, Australia, Italy, Turkey, and Switzerland (taken from www.wwdsie.org). In some of these countries, there is just one SE programme offered in just one university. SE’s presence in academia is almost nil in other countries, including India.
In a typical engineering college or department, there are some who question if SE can even be considered an engineering discipline! They ask what the physics-based foundations of SE are. They ask what the fundamental principles, laws, or concepts of SE are. “Isn’t SE just a set of best practices?”, they ask. These are not easy questions to answer. Therefore, such questions often remain unanswered, are answered unsatisfactorily, or are conveniently avoided. The additional challenge for SE is that there are different schools of thought within the SE community with strong yet conflicting opinions.
One of the factors that students look for before deciding on their majors is job opportunities once they graduate. Here, students hear mixed messages. SE is supposed to be valuable in any system development but yet, not many industries appear to directly recruit SE graduates and many industries do not have a title/designation called ‘systems engineer’!
Identity Crisis in Industry
In many organizations, SE is practiced without being labeled as SE. At the same time, some organizations may claim to be performing SE but it could be some incomplete distorted version of SE that they actually practice. Also, there are industries where ‘systems engineers’ perform in roles and responsibilities that do not seem to align well with what may be considered to be SE.
Between DH & KS, we know many engineers working in technology directorates of systems development agencies. We also know people who lead systems development projects. They all practice SE to various degrees. To many of them, those practices have come as legacy without being labeled as SE. These professionals question the need for and relevance of SE as a separate discipline. SE has emerged into what it is today, based on best practices from certain industries and domains over the past 50-60 years. SE sounds nothing new and engineers claim that they are already doing what SE is recommending. There is some truth in this, since SE will not be totally new. But what they often fail to see are the things that SE is suggesting but they do not do. Similar situations are encountered when SE spreads its wings to domains and industries that have not been traditionally using SE. There is overlap with some activities already being performed in organizations. People tend to focus on the overlap and decide that SE is not worth pursuing, while ignoring the rest of SE that could provide additional value.
SE today, is at best, a union of best practices gathered from the development of various complex engineering systems, starting with aerospace defense systems. As the nature of complex systems changes, so will the best practices, and thereby the discipline of SE. As software drives most of the functionality of today’s systems; as new technologies keep finding their way into these systems; as boundaries between disciplines disappear during the design, development, and realization of successful systems; as customers continue to demand products faster-better-cheaper; as SE is found to be valuable in the engineering of not just traditional systems but of services, enterprises, and combinations of them; and as complex systems are increasing being developed (and manufactured) by globally distributed expert teams, the disciple of SE will continue to morph and evolve. Therefore, even those individuals and organizations that may have been performing SE in the past need to update and upgrade themselves to the current state of SE, which will continue to advance. No shift is more dramatic than the transformation of SE from a traditional document-based / document-intensive approach to a model-based digital approach.
Our intent is to be a “Friend of SE”, and to explore / clarify many of the terms and concepts that are part of SE today. Our hope is to answer SE related questions in people’s minds (as shown in the illustration below) – some of which are asked aloud, while some are not. We wish that doubters of SE would start believing in SE and begin adopting it. We are seriously concerned about people who feel they are already doing SE (while they are not), and about those who do not see value in formal SE.
We believe that there is a “True SE” that is yet to be fully comprehended. Individuals, organizations, and professional bodies are trying to figure this out as they practice and promote SE. We are doing the same, based on our experiences and perspectives. If you have unanswered SE-related questions in your mind, or have heard questions being asked about SE that you do not know how to answer, please add them in the comments below or send us an email. We will address them in our upcoming blog articles.
- KS & DH
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