about Us

The Center of Excellence in Systems Engineering will be nationally and internationally recognized for its programs, which promote research, publication, collaboration, and industrial application. The center will also be a leader in demonstrating that systems thinking applies to all enterprises, from manufacturing to healthcare to defense systems and education.

The goals for the center include the following:

• Educate students with our signature master's degree program in systems engineering
• Engage enterprises with a design process for sustainability
• Connect students and industry with research, collaboration, and employment opportunities
• Pioneer advancements in the field of systems engineering

Here are our two relevant, long-term measures:

• Receive national recognition for the university's engineering program
• Develop state-of-the-art laboratories which are involved in continual engagement with students and industry

Systems thinking is a mindset and an approach to improvement that requires us to see that optimizing piece parts of a system does not improve the overall system.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind as an example of making piece-parts improvements. Kaizen is the Japanese word for continuous improvement. Point Kaizen, or improvement, may fall into the trap of making improvements that do not impact the whole system. Systems design, on the other hand, focuses on the flow and way an enterprise delivers value to its customers.

So why do we tend to optimize the parts instead of the whole? And what is the result on society? It's easier to optimize the parts, and we do not have a language to describe how to improve an overall system. Instead, we have traditional management accounting that steers us to evaluate and to optimize parts of a system.

It falsely claims that we can optimize and improve a system by summing up the individual improvements to parts of a system.

Systems thinking and system design are what lead to true systems improvements.