Papers by Dorothy Mckinney
INCOSE International Symposium, Jun 30, 2023
This working paper treats research progress on educational accountability. The document first def... more This working paper treats research progress on educational accountability. The document first defines accountability and provides its historical backgroundr gives some reasons for its current popularity, and establishes its relationship to the society that engendered it. Next, the paper focuses on the two major issues in accountability-(1) its tools and techniques and (2) the way in which they are combined and put to work. Within the framework of the first issue, there is discussion of testing and evaluation incentives, collective bargaining, and institutional competitiveness. Scapegoating and the question of local control versus national standardization are taken up under the second issue. The documentconcludes with a disrussioh of various plans to implemen+accountabilityw such as inrentive pay for teachers, peri contracting, program planning and budgeting systems, educational vouchers, and alternative schools within the public school system. fAuthor/JF) CH TMi OF
INCOSE International Symposium, 2009
Emergent behaviors exist in biological systems, physical systems and human performance. It is an ... more Emergent behaviors exist in biological systems, physical systems and human performance. It is an inherited nature of a System‐of‐Systems (SoS). SoS displays a global complexity that cannot be adequately managed by hierarchical structures and central control; therefore, traditional systems engineering and management approaches are necessary but insufficient for a SoS.Little is currently known about constructing an interoperable network of systems and the incorporation of emergent behaviors. The purpose of this panel is to explore the possibilities of developing an architecture model including the emergent behavior.The challenge is how to understand the initiation mechanisms of the emergent behaviors for a particular system architecture model so that the resident beneficial or harmful emergent behaviors can be enhanced or mitigated with selected changes in the model. Is model‐based the only feasible approach to develop the architecture model with emergent behavior? If this is the answ...
INCOSE International Symposium, Jul 1, 2022
INCOSE International Symposium
INCOSE International Symposium
We envision that Systems Engineering (SE) can be transformed into a truly transdisciplinary disci... more We envision that Systems Engineering (SE) can be transformed into a truly transdisciplinary discipline – a foundational meta-discipline that supports and enables collaboration between all the disciplines that should be involved in conceiving, building, using and evolving a system so that it will continue to be successful and fit for purpose as time passes. SE can be applied in different ways depending on the situation and how well current SE process patterns are matched to the problem in hand. We identify four elements of this new transdisciplinary framework: SE Tenets; SE Approach; SE Process; and SE Toolbox. We suggest that the use of SE then needs to be considered in three domains: problem space, solution space, and transformation space that helps us along the development-delivery-evolution trajectory. We propose twelve SE tenets and show how they should be applied in these three domains. We perceive that even though all elements of the current SE Process can be justified in term...
Complexity is nothing new to systems engineers and managers. The discipline of systems engineerin... more Complexity is nothing new to systems engineers and managers. The discipline of systems engineering evolved to improve our ability to deal with scale, interdependency, and complexity in systems development. Few systems engineers would doubt that complexity is increasing every year. The rate of change, the increasing interdependence and adaptability of systems, and the increasing ambitions of our clients ensure that complexity keeps expanding to the limits of our capacity to cope with it.
INCOSE International Symposium, 2017
This is the initial version of a primer on complexity for systems engineers. This short paper was... more This is the initial version of a primer on complexity for systems engineers. This short paper was abstracted from significantly longer and more detailed material, including papers previously written by this working group, in order to provide a reasonably short accounting of what systems engineers (and their managers) need to know about complexity. Comments are encouraged in the hopes of completing additional materials (more in-depth) and future versions of this primer.
INCOSE International Symposium
INCOSE International Symposium
The System Definition Survey issued to INCOSE Fellows in December 2016 revealed at least five rad... more The System Definition Survey issued to INCOSE Fellows in December 2016 revealed at least five radically distinct worldviews on Systems within a relatively small, but moderately representative, part of the INCOSE community. We describe and analyse the survey results, and comment on differences between the responses from the Fellows and the responses to a similar survey issued to the System Science Working Group a month later. Then we discuss how the different worldviews on " system " revealed by the surveys map onto different areas of the set of system definitions described in a previous paper. We conclude that all the worldviews identified offer useful perspectives for systems engineering, and that Systems Engineers need the flexibility to adopt different worldviews for different situations, or at least to act " as if " different worldviews are true in different situations.
INCOSE International Symposium
INSIGHT
INCOSE's definition of SE was compared to the aspirations set out in SE Vision 2025 for S... more INCOSE's definition of SE was compared to the aspirations set out in SE Vision 2025 for SE as it ought to be to address modern challenges. Doing this led us to three fundamental realisations. First, while " 20 th century systems " were, for the most part, " deterministic " or nearly so, 21 st century systems are on the other hand increasingly non-deterministic, adaptive or " evolutionary ". Second, while " 20 th Century Systems Engineering Management " was implicitly based on a " command and control " paradigm, 21 st Century Systems Engineering, to be successful, will usually need to use a more collaborative leadership paradigm. And third, that while 20 th Century systems were largely " single systems " , designed to " solve " specific problems, 21 st Century systems are almost invariably networked, and are parts of complex extended enterprises with multiple, often conflicting, stakeholder objectives, that are intimately related to complex societal challenges. We used elements of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to understand the implication and consequences of the paradigm shift implied by these realisations. A revised strawman definition of Systems Engineering is offered for consideration by INCOSE, showing the changes that would be required to take these and related factors into account.
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Papers by Dorothy Mckinney