INDUSTRY ADOPTION

While systems engineering has been accepted as a fundamental discipline across a growing number of application domains, the terminology, methods, and practices are still applied inconsistently across industries and organizations. Customization in different domains is important to efficiency and agility, but a common systems engineering framework would facilitate knowledge sharing across domains.

Industry Adoption

Systems engineering is broadly applied in aerospace and defense- and it is increasingly applied in other industries. However, even in aerospace and defense, the maturity of systems engineering practices varies across companies and across programs within a company.

The way systems engineering is practiced also varies with product complexity, project size, and experience of the engineering team. For example, systems engineering practices vary based on whether industries are market-driven or government-contracted with strong regulatory standards, and whether a product is delivered as a component or subsystem, or delivered as an integrated end-product or service.

Progress has been made in the last decade on standardizing terminology and practices for systems engineering across application domains. But there remains significant differences as one might expect across such varied domains. These domains have unique drivers that impact their systems engineering practices, but customization from a common framework can enhance efficiency and agility.