Reflections on INCOSE International Workshop 2023 By John Fitch
FEATURE ARTICLE
Reflections on INCOSE International Workshop 2023 by John Fitch (PPI Presenter and Principal Consultant) Email: jfitch@ppi-int.com Introduction
Copyright © 2022 by John Fitch. Authored for PPI SyEN.
The INCOSE International Workshop 2023 (IW2023) was held in Torrance, California, USA on 28-31 January 2023. This hybrid event was attended in-person by 411 participants; another 291 registrants engaged with their peers through the INCOSE virtual conference platform. Participants hailed from 27 countries and 63 different INCOSE chapters, emphasizing INCOSE’s global reach and diversity. Participants spread their time across 416 hours of meetings (197 discrete sessions) hosted by 87 INCOSE working groups or other organizations or initiatives.
SYSTEMS ENGINEERING RESOURCESFEATURE ARTICLE
PPI was represented in-person by Robert Halligan and René King and virtually by Randall Iliff and John Fitch. The PPI team dove deeply into a few topics of interest, while continuing to broadly survey the overall landscape of IW2023 to glean the insights that form the basis for our reflections documented herein. We were delighted to catch up with so many old friends and colleagues, and to begin new friendships with the people we met for the first time this year.
Reflections on INCOSE International The conference began with two keynote addresses that set a tone that PPI’s René King characterized Workshop 2023 as “forward moving – forward looking”. Keynotes
Dr. Olivier de Weck, MIT’s Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics, Professor of Engineering Systems, and Faculty Director of the Engineering Systems Laboratory (ESL), delivered the first keynote. by John Fitch (PPI Presenter and Principal Consultant) Dr. de Weck probed the foundations of systems engineering both from the scientific literature and Email: industrial practice. He compared the state ofjfitch@ppi-int.com systems engineering today with the 300-year evolution of chemical engineering from its roots in alchemy through the maturation of its scientific foundations Copyright © 2022 by chemical John Fitch. Authored for PPI SyEN. (e.g., the Periodic Table of the Elements and reactions between these elements) to the state of the practice today. If this pattern holds, system engineering, still searching for its scientific foundations, is very early in its development as a mature engineering discipline. As one of INCOSE’s earliest members, Randall Iliff from PPI observed that “Oli’s comments on the relative immaturity of SE are a great reminder that we are just starting the journey of helping the world to more efficiently engineer systems. It’s also important to take away his point that most of the world still operates at a level of ‘functional alchemy’ rather than established science. Alchemy is adequate for many routine tasks – we’ll do better by absorbing rather than fighting such use.” Dr. de Weck also made the case for developing a new overall equation governing systems science, an equation that preserves the amount of complexity before and after system development. Because the technical complexity of all types of systems is steadily increasing, there is a need to reduce the organizational complexity of our engineering system, i.e., to find the “sweet spot” between technical February 2023
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