By David Long and Zane Scott The late Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, famously said “all politics is local.” In that phrase he called to the surface a characteristic of politics that was often overlooked but always true. In the same way, we …

Willie Nelson getting ready to perform. Farm Aid 2009. Photo by Larry Philpot www.soundstagephotography.com On April 29 Willie had a birthday. “Maybe I didn’t love you- Quite as often as I could have” sings the just turned 80 year old legend, Willie Nelson, in his classic “You Were Always on …

  Recently a LinkedIn MBSE group post posed a fundamental question, “How can we move organizations from a document-centric approach to model-based systems engineering?” This raises a very basic inquiry into the ways to advocate the model-based systems engineering value proposition. There are two questions implied in this inquiry. The …

The second trap has to do with what constitutes a model. As we say on page 65 of Vitech’s Primer for Systems Engineering, “There are major advantages arising from using models as the basis of systems engineering. Models thoroughly consider the entire engineering problem, use a consistent language to describe …