Cultural Barriers to the Adoption of Systems Engineering Research

Abstract

An extensive amount of time and money is spent on developing methodologies and tools to improve the systems engineering process but much less is spent on addressing the organizational factors that can facilitate or hinder their adoption. This is partially due to engineering approach to problem solving which is technology centric. What is needed is an organization centric approach that complements the methods and tools being developed and considers the context in which they will be used. This paper explores the notion of adoption of systems engineering research by focusing on a specific example involving measurement systems. Results from an industry survey on the most critical attributes for adoption are presented and implications of these results are discussed in terms of the broader issue of systems engineering research.