Systems engineering as a process

Systems engineering has been developed as a convolution of organisation and individual engineering activity. Making a formal separation of concerns, it is argued that while systems engineering provides formal support and management of a platform, a position, a resource base for system engineering, system engineering is a composition of monitoring and modelling, defining and organising activities practised by individual engineers but with collective effect. These activities lead to the elaboration of systems and their support platforms with emergent properties meeting the requirements of customers which as projects become integrated into end-user environments. In the presentation, it is shown that system engineering is a response to business opportunity presented by differences in market demand and supply with the intention of reducing the so called quality-gap. The conclusion is that while system engineering is a profitless activity, profit can be associated, as an emergent property, with the systems engineering organisation. Such profit does not appear in financial terms, ostensibly, but as a reduction of outlay in the achievement of a given return, the delivery of the system to customers´ satisfaction. Profit or loss making as a result of project management or engineering activity is argued to be a sign of poor system engineering