SWISSED24 – From Artisans to Mass Production

The annual systems engineering conference of the Swiss Chapter of INCOSE, the SSSE, in Zurich was the place to be on 9 September. My proposal for a presentation on the subject From Artisans to Mass Production – Systems Engineering in the Enterprise had been accepted. Thus, I prepared myself working on the slides supporting my talk carefully. At the conference site, I was keen to check that my computer would be connected successfully to the conference equipment. Despite some minor quality issues on the projection screen in the initial attempt everything was fine. Just when I wanted to start my presentation the projection scene turned to darkness. The conference technician did his best to find a solution, and he did it. I was able to end my talk with the support of the most important slide: Thank you for your attention.

Overall, it has been quite an interesting experience. I was not in need to synchronise my talk with the content of the slides so that the listeners do not lose track when switching between reading the slides’ content and listening to my voice. Of course, I guess listeners had to maintain a higher attention level throughout the talk. However, they stayed, and I have got some friendly feedback from the audience.

The presentation outlines a new approach how to deal with the lack of sound enterprise considerations in systems engineering standards and textbooks. Claiming that the lack of concrete considerations on enterprises would be an indication for the wide applicability of systems engineering is weak. With this assumption, there is little need to think about, if development-on-demand is really the gold standard in systems engineering from which all other business models may be derived as tailored versions. By the way, the presentation contains a lot of evidence how essential advanced systems engineering capabilities are for resilience in enterprises and mature societies.