Prof. Appleby's Blog

A strong partnership with your key IT vendors can offer a genuine competitive advantage.  A vendor who wants to benefit from a long-term relationship with your company will take on the role of technical consultant.  When your vendor presents a proposal, use that opportunity to ask some important questions that will help you with planning and risk management.

The link below will take you to a presentation on this subject.  The twelve key questions are also listed below.

Vendor.Challenge

Twelve Important Question

1. Have you made any assumptions about our requirements that you would like to verify today?
2. What process did you follow to ensure that you understood and will be able to meet our requirements?
3. How have you validated that this design will meet our requirements?
4. Who else within our industry has taken this approach?
5. Are you aware of any quality problems with any of the components in this design?
6. Have all components and interfaces been tested together successfully?
7. Is there anything you would have liked to include in your design, but omitted due to price considerations?
8. As our system workload increases, what is the first resource we are likely to exhaust?
9. How will this system change the way we operate today?
10. What physical site preparations will this design require?
11. Are you of the opinion that we have the people resources needed to successfully complete this project?
12. What do you think will be our greatest challenge in implementing this system?

Continuing with our discussion of systems engineering, I would like to quote a small portion of the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook, Version 2.0, p.11, dated July 2000. This will give you a sense of both the technical nature of systems engineering and the wide variety of skill sets required within the field.

International Council on Systems Engineering
SE Handbook Working Group

“Systems engineering is an overarching discipline, providing the tradeoffs and integration between system elements to achieve the best overall product and/or service. Although there are some important aspects of project management in the Systems Engineering process, it is still much more of an engineering discipline than a management discipline. It is a very quantitative discipline, involving tradeoff, optimization, selection, and integration of the products of many engineering disciplines.”

“In its present (and still evolving) form, Systems Engineering combines elements of many disciplines such as operations research, system modeling and simulation, decision analysis, project management and control, requirements development, software engineering, specialty engineering, industrial engineering, specification writing, risk management, interpersonal relations, liaison engineering, operations analysis, and cost estimation.”

I have a real love for mathematics and, unexpectedly, I discovered that I enjoyed applying math to business problems.  This led to my taking numerous courses in operations research / management science, decision analysis, statistics and probability, mathematical models, and simulation.  Ultimately, this led to a career in systems engineering with IBM.

I would like for my blog to provide some value to young people who are considering careers in technology or careers in other disciplines that make use of technology.

Toward that end, I want to put some focus on the field of systems engineering.  We might begin with the basic question,

“What is systems engineering?”

A good starting place to learn about the field would be to visit this webpage of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE):

http://www.incose.org/practice/whatissystemseng.aspx

Then, for more detail, go to this INCOSE webpage:

http://www.incose.org/practice/fellowsconsensus.aspx

On the page above, Brian Mar offers the following as core concepts of systems engineering:

• Understand the whole problem before you try to solve it
• Translate the problem into measurable requirements
• Examine all feasible alternatives before selecting a solution
• Make sure you consider the total system life cycle. The birth to death concept extends to maintenance, replacement and decommission. If these are not considered in the other tasks, major life cycle costs can be ignored.
• Make sure to test the total system before delivering it.
• Document everything.

We’ll talk more about this soon.

I am re-reading The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien and there is a part (p.80) in which he describes how Nellas taught Turin…

“…to speak the Sindarin tongue after the manner of the ancient realm, older, and more courteous, and richer in beautiful words.”

Does that not capture your imagination?  I felt a moment of loss.  How easy it is to let our patterns of speech devolve into brief, simplistic, unimaginative statements.  I wish I could speak in the manner he describes.  Have we forgotten how?

I have long thought that, as part of training our clients in public speaking, we should start by having them learn to read Shakespeare aloud.  I’m serious.

(Note to self: Consider for EE611.  Oh, and mention to Jennifer).

(Last summer, we did at least employ the Gettysburg Address as a teaching tool.)

I will add something else to this discussion.  This is from another book I recommend, A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis, p.21.  Here, Lewis speaks of the technique of the epic and says this:

“The language, therefore, must be familiar in the sense of being expected.  But in Epic, which is the highest species of oral court poetry, it must not be familiar in the sense of being colloquial or commonplace.  The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one.  We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not.  They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts that no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly proclaimed itself to be poetry. What is the point of having a poet, inspired by the Muse, if he tells the stories just as you or I would have told them?”

This is true for a leader as well.  There is an art to speaking in a style that conveys confident leadership.