Each year, generally right after the Fourth of July, the International Council of Systems Engineering (INCOSE) holds their International Symposium (IS). This year, the symposium was held in Adelaide, Australia. The venue was the newly renovated Adelaide Convention Center. The theme of this year’s event was “Unlocking Innovation through Systems …

Recently, my wife and I watched the multi-part television series on Albert Einstein, developed for the National Geographic Channel and directed by Ron Howard. Despite some of the criticism leveled at the effort, like compressing portions of the timeline and the screenplay’s inclusion of his first wife’s contribution to his …

What do you gain by taking the systems engineering approach? Stop and think about that for a minute. As a systems engineer, you may know the answer, but how do you explain it to other people? In a recent blog post, Vitech principal systems engineer Fran McCafferty wrote about how …

I graduated from Temple University in 1987, and was married later that summer. So yes, I’m an old guy—before anyone feels the urge to point that out. Early in my career as a systems engineer, I worked in a highly classified environment. The facility rules didn’t allow people to bring …