How do you spend these days at the very end of a year?
“Hidden” between Christmas and New Year this period often feels as if it is somehow “protected” from the regular business activities. Many people are on vacation – you, your business partners, clients, … (maybe even your service providers ;-( ).
It is also the time when we typically draw balance, review the past year and make plans for the new one. Btw., have you ever looked at a calendar year from a systems engineering approach, identifying what went into it, what was generated or left inside and what came out of it – the year 2015?
And these hidden days might give us the time and occasion to spend some thoughts “outside the box” – to catch up with ideas we once put aside, to be creative and draw formerly unthought conclusions, to be visionary and maybe plant the seed for a new business or technology.
From the technological viewpoint, we’re facing many new developments having emerged just in the last few years, that will even more affect our daily life in 2016 and beyond – new forms of mobility, the way of energy supply, safety&security solutions or formerly impossible methods of worlwide virtual collaboration.
Many of these challenging areas might be covered by the idea of the Internet of Things, many stand for completely new levels of complexity – as well in the digital, synthetic “online” universe as also in the real, social “offline” world.
However, if you look at the development processes established today in many companies, you might quickly come down to the ground again. Before creating the “brave new world”, in the very first step a much better understanding of elementary processes, entities and connectivities is an absolute must — to be solved before entering into the next higher levels.
What is the most efficient way to apply our valuable engineering knowledge? – How can we define, apply, document and reuse “fractal” engineering objects, down to the very basic logical, mathematical, physical dependencies? – And how can we manage them easily and efficiently, maybe validate them by virtually re-developping some of our well-known existing products – before we then aggregate and compile them into completely new solutions?
Maybe at the end it all boils down to the question: How are we going to apply system engineering tomorrow?
Recently I came across the following article on precisely this topic, published some weeks ago by José Reis. Maybe at the entry point to a new year you also find it inspirational and motivating for your future engineering activity.
Feel free to leave your comments below. I’m looking forward to share some ideas and support you.
And for now wish you a good, successfull and innovative year 2016!