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Systems Thinking is currently a popular topic among the general public as well as in colleges and universities. Systems Thinking helps solve complex problems that cannot be solved using conventional means, helps engineers design functional and reliable systems, and helps to understand why the world looks and behaves as it does. However, Systems Thinking is usually not integrated into engineering curricula; instead, it is either taught as a stand-alone, independent program or course, or it is not taught at all. We believe that this is sub-optimal. Just as mathematics, physics, and computer science are integrated into engineering courses as fundamental tools, so should Systems Thinking be. Here we provide several examples demonstrating the application and benefits of Systems Thinking to a variety of engineering disciplines with the objective of convincing university administrators and instructors to integrate it into every engineering discipline.

The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) is a key tool used by the United States engineering and acquisition communities. The DoDAF provides a method to organize system engineering information into a series of architecture products, and groups them into different “views” of the system. These viewpoints represent traditional perspectives of system architecture data, such as operations or technologies. With a new release of the DoDAF, it is now possible to create viewpoints that extend the system architecture to include new types of data such as a Human Viewpoint, which includes information about the human component of the system. This “Non Legacy” viewpoint can be used to augment the standard sets of architectural products with human-centered information important to the system description. However, the methodology to include new viewpoints in the DoDAF is not defined. While the DoDAF specification indicates that new data elements can be included in unique architecture products, there is no guidance on how to instantiate these representations while adhering to the DoDAF Meta Model (DM2) data schema. The focus of this research effort was to develop a methodology to implement the Human Viewpoint by extending the DM2 constructs while preserving the integrity of the overall architecture. The proposed methodology includes augmenting the underlying data schema, identifying the format to render the output models, ensuring that the additional views remains linked to the overall architecture, and evaluating the implications of the additional viewpoint. A flexible architecting tool, the Architex Decision Support Toolset, was used as an architecture test-bed to evaluate the feasibility of implementing Non Legacy viewpoints using the prescribed process. The outcome of this work can be extended to provide a general methodology for including other Non Legacy viewpoints with the DoDAF architecture framework.