In my “other job” as an elected representative for my county, I am often called upon to speak to community organizations and business groups, and to attend diverse events throughout my district and county. Just about any time I am present in a gathering of citizens, the conversation turns to …

Complexity is nothing new to systems engineers and managers. The discipline of systems engineering evolved to improve our ability to deal with scale, interdependency, and complexity in systems development. Few systems engineers would doubt that complexity is increasing every year. The rate of change, the increasing interdependence and adaptability of …

Ponder these statements: Managing complexity is one of the great challenges of our time. One of the fundamental tenets of systems engineering is that optimizing the components will not optimize the system. We as a society have a bias toward practicality. The goal of language is to give voice to …

This is Part VI, the concluding installment of a series of posts about the history of Vitech. Part I recounts the company’s beginnings, in 1992. Part II tells the story of an influential mentor. In Part III, Vitech helps a company weather the Y2K transition in the late 1990s. In …