Title: Hidden Danger: Are Your Systems Engineering Tools Safe and Reliable?
Speaker: James Collins, Ph.D., MSSE
Abstract: The first Systems Engineering (SE) tools were manual record keeping and charts. As complexity and scale increased further and computers became available, computer-based SE tools were introduced to bound the human effort required for record keeping and documentation and to relieve the delays inherent in human data handling and exchange. Today, many widely used SE tools are large software applications that fulfill the promise of reducing manual labor and expediting processes, but they also hide what they are doing with the data entrusted to them. This introduces the possibility of lost or altered data which may not be apparent to systems engineering teams. So … Are your critical SE tools safe and reliable? What are the risks if they are not? Does your SE application vendor have your back? How can you avoid engineering errors or compliance failures when using SE tools? What’s your experience using modern SE tools?
Jim Collins is a retired systems engineer formerly with Northrop Grumman as Security Technology Engineer and lead Melbourne Export Technical Advisor and currently the Engineering Systems Department at FIT as adjunct faculty. He previously presented to INCOSE SCC in 2012 entitled “Hidden Data – Hidden Danger”. Jim earned a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a doctorate in Astrophysics from Indiana University and a masters in Systems Engineering from FIT. He worked in government and private sector aerospace for over thirty-five years.