Joe Kasser

Vision for INCOSE
INCOSE's most important assets are its members. The Board of Directors has a fundamental responsibility to serve the membership by taking actions to promote the progressive improvement in the acceptance of the value of systems engineering in our larger communities, in the professional quality of life of systems engineers and in the practice of systems engineering as a whole. I remain committed to making INCOSE the premier professional organization representing the voices of systems engineers throughout the world.

As secretary over the past two years, I have strived with the other Board members to make the new governance structure work to the benefit of the members, ensuring that the diverse viewpoints of our members are thoughtfully heard and discussed in the deliberations of the Board of Directors. I have supported making the work of the Board more open by publishing key messages and Board minutes on the INCOSE web site. The Agenda 2006 is the Board’s roadmap for the next several years. I believe that we should go further and announce the Board agendas ahead of the meetings.

At the same time, I believe the Board has a responsibility to lead INCOSE in taking initiatives that have significant implications, both visibly and financially. I am proud of the leadership role of the Board in adopting an INCOSE Code of Ethics. I believe the Board needs to insist on accountability for the quality, cost and timeliness of INCOSE products and therefore fully support the program management structure we have instituted for major initiatives. When leading, the Board remains accountable for its actions to the members.

I support the initiative for certification of systems engineers, but have all the while insisted that we do it in a careful, measured way that is financially prudent and results in a quality program that meets the immediate needs of a segment of our community, while having a transition plan for wider acceptance.

I also support the initiatives for stronger commercial and academic outreach without neglecting the needs of our legacy roots. That we can achieve this has precedence with other professional organizations in the engineering community serving diverse segments. For academic outreach we need to more proactively encourage the establishment of many viable student chapters guided by faculty members who are INCOSE members.

We have instituted membership surveys and are soon to implement a balanced scorecard to capture what we are doing well and what needs improvement. I support providing the members each year with a report card of our findings. If elected I will continue to work with the Board and other organizations that are part of the governance structure to facilitate appropriate initiatives from the survey findings.

I strongly endorse a marketing effort to build more effective public awareness that promotes the value of INCOSE and systems engineering. This marketing focus will help nurture strategic partnerships with other professional societies and also serve to attract new members and retain existing members.

Profile
Mr. Miller has been an active member of INCOSE since 1993. He was previously elected INCOSE secretary for the 1997-1998 and 2003-2004 terms of office. He is also serving a one year term as the secretary of the INCOSE Foundation, a charitable organization with the goal of advancing the development and image of systems engineering through funded scholarships, research, and international forums.

Mr. Miller has been co-chair of the Human Systems Working Group and Metrics Working Group. At the local level he has served as secretary and president of the Liberty Chapter. He has authored or co-authored 9 papers presented at INCOSE International Symposia, Regional Conferences and in INSIGHT. He has been a featured program speaker at several local chapters.

Mr. Miller consults in the areas of communications and information systems. He is Industry Professor of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management in the graduate school at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He retired from AT&T as District Manager in 1998 after 25 years professional experience in both commercial and military communications. He served as a Bell Laboratories systems engineer for 18 of those years where he was Chief Systems Engineer for several forward-looking communications R&D projects. During the first half of the 1990’s at Bell Labs, Mr. Miller served on the Systems Engineering Process Management Team, which served on behalf of the AT&T- Federal Systems business. In that role, he was directly involved in the development of many corporate best practices, and in the selection and implementation of SE procedures and tools. He also served in a SE consulting role to AT&T’s commercial business.

From 1985 to 1989, Mr. Miller served as the chair of two multinational technical feasibility study teams addressing embedded communications systems. These teams fused the best engineering talent of their member nations to make balanced technology and capability recommendations to the sponsor.

Mr. Miller has been a member of IEEE for 32 years and has authored or co-authored 8 papers outside of INCOSE. Mr. Miller received his BSEE in 1971 and his MSEE in 1973, both from the Pennsylvania State University.

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Vision for INCOSE
While deciding whether or not to stand for this election, I kept coming back to a central question: “Why grow?” I personally find the idea of growing to feed future growth unattractive, especially as it can be a disruptive process – think of teenagers! So why do it? We know that things seldom stay the same for very long; if we don’t grow we can anticipate decline and its consequences. New members bring their interests, knowledge, enthusiasm and energy to our society. Our growing diversity contributes to a vibrant community with a sustainable future, while extending recognition of INCOSE as a global authority. The extent of our technical programme, intellectual capital, and quality of leadership are also determined by the membership and commitment we attract.

Building on previous initiatives; I believe we individual members can leverage what and who we already know into an informal organization intentionally delivering international growth. By enabling and recognizing widespread individual contribution, we can mobilize ourselves to achieve real growth in a succession of specific territories. Our continued international growth helps secure the future of INCOSE while also exerting, in a small way, an integrative global influence.

Profile
Christopher Dean has over 30-years engineering experience in various sectors, including telecommunications and civil air transportation. During this period he has worked for businesses of all scales, from micro-enterprises through global corporations. For the last decade he has worked on harmonization initiatives; integrating culturally diverse, international teams (Airbus embraces 50 nationalities, speaking 20+ languages). Christopher presently renders strategic facilitation services as an internal consultant; helping to make sense of complex situations. As an INCOSE member since 1996, he has regularly supported national and international events; helped coordinate a series of events in the UK West Country; is Co-Chair of the Joint Air Transportation WG; and is a contributor to other Working Groups.

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Vision for INCOSE
Strategic Presence is all about positioning INCOSE to advance the discipline of systems engineering in ways that reflect our strategic plan and directions, while also accommodating the realities of our size and the fact that most of our work is done by dedicated volunteers. I propose to follow six working principles that will frame my efforts to build our strategic presence over the next few years. These principles include:

1. INCOSE, while growing at an impressive rate, is too small at the present time to compete on equal footing with the larger professional societies, and so we must leverage our opportunities by carefully choosing areas that establish our leadership without directly competing. Leadership in systems engineering is not an entitlement of INCOSE; we will earn our right to be leaders by clearly articulating the critical issues facing our profession and then doing something about them. For example, the recent Executive Summit gives us a great opportunity to make a near term and long term impacts.
2. We need to come up with a few bold and compelling strategies that provide the highest level of visibility for INCOSE – strategies that other professional societies will rally around because it is in their collective interests to join us. And then we must be very aggressive about promoting ourselves in ways that do not appear to be self-serving. A good example is our co-sponsorship of a strategic summit on improving the education system so that more young people will be attracted to careers in engineering.
3. We need to be proactive in our efforts, not reactive, collaborative not competitive. We should not engage in arguments about who should be the leader or spokesperson for systems engineering, who should be defining systems engineering, who should be the certification agent for systems engineers, who should set standards, and who has the inside track on what should be in a SE Handbook or Book of Knowledge. This wastes energy and keeps us from being proactive and positive.
4. We should collaborate with those who are working in our field and enhance their efforts regardless of whether we get the public credit or not. We should take the high ground and advance systems engineering. By doing so, we will enhance our organization. A good example would be to build more effective partnerships with the commercial community.
5. A strategic plan is necessary but not sufficient to advance INCOSE’s strategic presence. We must act and take prudent risks in moving forward. By engaging and providing energy to our actions, we will inform our strategic planning process more than anything else. Without action, the strategic plan is an intellectual exercise. What we do, we must do well. The formation of a powerful INCOSE Foundation is an example of this principle.
6. The process of establishing strategic presence should be inclusive and engage as many of the INCOSE stakeholders as possible – primarily the chapters. Leadership is a key ingredient of establishing strategic presence, and we must seek ways in which to strengthen and support our leadership corps within INCOSE.

Profile
Dr. Ewald has been an active member of INCOSE since 1996. For the last three years, he has been Director for Strategic Presence on the Board of Directors for INCOSE, focusing on a number of important initiatives. Prior to this, he served for two years as a Director-by-Appointment focusing on organizational effectiveness. In this capacity, he played significant roles in strategic planning, building stronger working relationships among the diverse constituencies on the Board, facilitating Board retreats and meetings, and executive coaching. During his tenure as Director-by-Appointment, he was very active in benchmarking best practices of non-profit boards, authored a comprehensive governance report to the INCOSE Board, and served on the governance sub-committee that studied and recommended changes that has produced the present governance structure of INCOSE. Dr. Ewald has also worked to build stronger connections between INCOSE and potential strategic partners. Examples include: successful solicitation of the Chief Engineer of the U.S. Navy to be the first government platinum sponsor of an INCOSE International Symposium (Melbourne), and to be a co-sponsor with INCOSE, the American Society of Naval Engineers and the Human Factors Society for an International Symposium on Knowledge Warfare.

In his capacity as the Director for Strategic Presence, he established an INCOSE Foundation dedicated to advancing systems engineering in the fields of education, research and other areas of strategic importance; built a base for forging important strategic alliances with other professional societies; positioned INCOSE to co-host an international strategic summit on advancing engineering and mathematics literacy from the earliest grades through college (scheduled for 2005); and is in the process of developing an INCOSE leadership development policy and plans. As the Director of Strategic Presence, he also served as the secretary for the recent INCOSE Executive Summit in which invited corporate executives discussed the most important issues facing systems engineering today – he has been charged to come up with a priority action list for INCOSE, which will guide the agenda for strategic presence in the next two years.

Dr. Ewald has participated in many other INCOSE activities. He has served as the co-chair of the Human Systems Engineering Working Group since 1997, co-editing the April 2000 Insight issue on “Understanding Human Systems - the Key to Effective Systems Engineering.” He also helped edit and authored an article for the October 2002 Insight issue on “Progress Toward Multi-National Systems Engineering Practices: A Coalition Perspective.” He was a principal in producing the recent INCOSE code of ethics. He is currently the Chairman of the Governance Committee of the Chesapeake Chapter. Dr. Ewald was the panel moderator for “A Standard for Business: ISO/IEC 15288” at the most recent International Symposium in Toulouse. He has also been a panel member during the last two International Symposia for the Anti-Terrorism Working Group presentations – his focus was on the psychological aspects of terrorism.

For the past twenty five years, Dr. Ewald has been involved with strategic planning, systems thinking and systems engineering in national and international settings. In this context, he has worked with industry, academia and government agencies. One of his current assignments is serving as the facilitator of The Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP) Technical Panel 4, which involves the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand in the implementation of advanced acquisition concepts such as system of systems methodologies, simulation based acquisition, integrated digital environments, life cycle planning, and evolutionary acquisition. Dr. Ewald chaired a panel at the Melbourne INCOSE symposium on the TTCP efforts to address the engineering and acquisition of systems of systems among coalition forces. He also played significant planning and facilitation roles in the highly regarded Workshops on Engineering of Systems in the 21st Century (WES-21) sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

In addition, Dr. Ewald has worked for over 30 years with non-profit boards, professional societies, and associations who are attempting to provide more effective service to their constituencies. He has helped them with strategic planning; mission, vision, and values clarification; public relations and other outreach initiatives; capital and fundraising campaigns; customer and marketing (including Web-based) surveys; and balanced scorecard approaches to track progress. He believes this experience, his broad consulting practice in the international arena with academia, industry and government, and close working relationships with many of the past and present INCOSE leadership position him as a strong candidate for continuing in the role as Director of Strategic Presence.

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Vision for INCOSE
Region VI is so large and empty on the map that it reminds me of the 19th century maps with blank spaces and signs that say “here be dragons”. Well dragons are part of the folklore of the Far East, a major part of Region VI .I see INCOSE Region VI as more than just Australia, Korea and Taiwan. I’d like to build a regional spirit. As such I have taken the lead in making the SETE 2004 an INCOSE Region VI conference. I’d like to see Singapore host an INCOSE Region VI conference in 2005 conference with the goal of starting a chapter there, followed by a Region VI conference in Korea in 2006 and then an international symposium hosted by Region VI in Korea in 2007. By that time I hope Region VI will be active enough to split into more than one region.

On an international perspective, I would like to help transform INCOSE from an American organisation with overseas chapters to a true federation of national societies. I took the first step along this path by assisting in the formation of INCOSE Australia, in which I serve as President. INCOSE-Australia is designed to provide INCOSE products and services to those members of the Systems Engineering Society of Australia (SESA) who desire them.

Profile
Joseph Kasser has been a practising systems engineer for 30 years. He is the author of "Applying Total Quality Management to Systems Engineering" published by Artech House. Dr. Kasser holds a Doctor of Science in Engineering Management from The George Washington University, and is a Certified Manager. Currently, he is the Defence Science and Technology Organisation Associate Research Professor at the Systems Engineering and Evaluation Centre at the University of South Australia (UniSA). He performs research into improving the Defence acquisition process, the nature of systems engineering and the properties of object-oriented requirements. He is also the Project Manager for the Defence Materiel Organisation customised section of the Master of Project Management postgraduate degree. Prior to taking up his position at UniSA, he was a Director of Information and Technical Studies at the Graduate School of Management and Technology at University of Maryland University College. There, he developed and was responsible for the Master of Software Engineering degree and the Software Development Management track of the Master of Science in Computer Systems Management (CSMN) degree. He is a recipient of NASA’s Manned Space Flight Awareness Award for quality and technical excellence (Silver Snoopy), for performing and directing systems engineering. Dr. Kasser also teaches systems and software engineering in the classroom and via distance education.

He is also president of the INCOSE-Australia chapter and currently represents Region VI on the INCOSE Member Board.