This is Systems Engineering
Its all about upsetting people.
Introduction
This is an introductory story that I meant to publish some time ago, but could never finish because it always ends up with me going into an endless tirade, that I know most folk don’t really want to read.
So here I will keep it short, and just use to introduce what might become a series, if enough folk want to know how to do some systems Engineering, I will build the series according to feedback.
As usual, no feedback will mean no series.
The Business
If you ever had the ambition of building something great, something world changing, something beneficial, and you looked at the discipline of Systems Engineering from the outside, wishing you were in it, so as you might do what some other greats in history might do, adding benefit to humanity, and the world, analysing the ultimate system, the system of everything….
Have another look.
Keep looking.
Do you see anybody appreciating this ability, the ability to put all the disciplines together, so as to trace through all the inter-systemic effects, all the implications of everything everybody does?
Nope.
Nobody likes a smart-ass.
What they want. even other people claiming to be in the same discipline of systems Engineering but who never did the work you did, is to be able to keep making profit. Even although you showed profit is what is killing the planet, its the thing that is driving up the temperature, they want to keep doing it.
So if you were under any illusions, that Systems Engineering is all about impersonal, deterministic, physical considerations, think again.
It starts with a stakeholder analysis. This is what we do to elaborate and ennumerate the concerns of all people, and other living things including the planet — anything and everything concerned.
In this, the primary stakeholder has to be the planet, and us secondary, because without a healthy planet we are nothing.
An example of stakeholder analysis, applied to Ai, is below:
