A Systems Primer

sg micheal

Preface

This “missalette” was inspired by my good friend and colleague, Bruce Harvey. To call him an amateur physicist is demeaning since he spends more quality time and concentration on physics than many professionals. During many emails, shot between him and me, it became clear that he had no idea what I spoke of - when I referred to the ‘systems approach’. What is the systems approach? Why does it apply to physics? Please wait for the introduction, for the answer to the former. In answer to the latter, I have written many essays available at my website www.altphy.org. If you’re curious about the “battle between virtual particles and curvature”, please visit.

Introduction

What is the systems approach? First let me give you an example of what it is not. Imagine you are a programmer and I am your supervisor. I give you a task such as “Mike, please design and code a software system that models bumble-bee flight”. You search the internet and on your way home, hit the local library. The next day, you start coding. This is most emphatically NOT the systems approach. I asked you to design the code first. It is the difference between computer programming and software engineering.

Another example: suppose I am a customer and you are an architect. I come to you asking you to design a new city hall for our growing town. We talk money and you start brainstorming ideas with your design team. After several months you produce a wonderfully esthetic and efficient design that fits surrounding architecture, but I scream at you “This is NOT what I asked for; I wanted something unique - that stood out from surrounding architecture! I want my money back!” You never asked me what I wanted. We never interacted over the design. We never considered maintenance.

You begin to get the idea, of the essentials, of the systems approach.

Chapter One - Essentials

The systems approach is at once: holistic and integrative while practical and objective. It encompasses the decompositional approach, but does not focus on that nor use it exclusively. The decompositional approach is exactly what it says: the breaking into parts of a system, for analysis and control. Science has exploited the inherent power of this approach while engineers have employed, yes you got it, the systems approach.

The notions of ‘boundary’ and ‘scope’ coupled with ‘maintenance’ and ‘reliability’ contain the essence of the systems approach.

When you approach a real-world system, with the intent of understanding and control, you have to use the systems approach - out of sheer practicality. Do you want to waste company resources? Do you want to flounder around - squandering talent and human energy? Then close this missalette and throw it away. Otherwise..

Identify system boundary: what is the system you are considering? What are its major components? What belongs in the system and what is outside? Draw a diagram. Brainstorm. Talk with your associates. Perspective is everything. Change it. See what happens - how it affects your model. What are the critical relationships between components? Stop. Breath. Wait for inspiration .. If nothing happens, perhaps you are on the right track. If you try to hurry this process, you are as doomed as if you employed another approach.

Identify scope: what are your design responsibilities? What is the customer, if any, asking for? Is the project feasible within budget constraints? Is the project feasible in the first place? Let me tell you about a sad story relating to scope. I used to work for a utility company in Michigan. I was part of the IT division. We were responsible for producing computer code that fulfilled internal corporate needs. One day management asked us to write a system that was to be our “new billing system”. Years and thousands of man-hours later, we produced it. Sure, it did what it was supposed to do: bill and account for customers, but consider the time frame and effort. Needless to day, our division director was demoted and publicly humiliated.

The criticality of this process cannot be over emphasized. The constraints come down to: what resources are under our control and the appropriateness of applying those resources in the grander scheme of things.

Identify maintenance concerns: this is usually neglected, so some special effort must be employed in the process. How long will the system be in use? By how many individuals? What are their concerns? It largely depends on the nature of the system you are designing. Is it a control system or simple user interface? Is the system complex or fairly simple? Are you designing a new car or game-program? Expect to pay about as much for maintenance as you did for initial construction. This means: change in design of the product to satisfy end-user requirements. How do you get those changes out? Do you make an upgrade available or do you have to recall an entire line of vehicles? These are maintenance concerns and they Cost. It should be clear: the more effort you put into designing a maintenance-free product, the less you pay in maintenance costs.

Perhaps the most important system process, aside from scope, is the reliability concern. Reliability engineering is perhaps the most neglected and important field in existence today. It is the engineering analogy of insurance. Look at Columbia. Look at Challenger. Were these failures avoidable? Only from a reliability perspective. Typically, reliability concerns are “addressed” by painting numbers on things. You estimate the probability of failure and multiply by cost of repair and you end up with failure-cost, for that particular failure mode.

It should be obvious how incomplete that approach is to reliability. Your personal estimate of failure probability cannot be taken as authoritative unless you employ the systems-reliability approach, which is the whole point of this missalette.

Chapter 2 - The Systems-Reliability Approach to Systems Engineering

The notion of cascade failure should be immediately recognizable by anyone living in midwestern US. Even New Yorkers should perk up their ears at this point in their reading. If your eyebrows didn’t raise, then you either: live in a cave or you simply don’t care.

If you don’t care, wad up this booklet and use it to start a fire in your hearth. If you’re living in a cave, I can’t understand how you got this booklet in the first place. Hopefully it is not after the ozone is gone and you’re living in a cave because it’s the “end of the world”. Ozone depletion is precisely the kind of thing we must discuss to understand cascade failure. Try to imagine the consequences of complete ozone-shield depletion .. Mull it over in your mind .. The first thing that should come to mind is increased UV radiation here on the surface .. But what are the consequences of that increased UV? It doesn’t take a prophet to see we might be facing a catastrophic failure.

And it doesn’t take a systems engineer to recognize a critical component failure can cause a cascade failure of other components resulting in total catastrophic, or system-wide failure. If it sounds like I am preaching “dooms day”, it is only because of my faith in the systems-reliability approach. If I’ve caught your attention, if you’ve read ‘till this point, perhaps we have a chance .. I have nothing to gain from your acceptance that the systems approach is a better way to solve complex problems; the only “gain” I could possibly have is the knowledge that we would not be squandering resources and time.

The systems-reliability approach has proven itself to be one of the most efficient and practical methods for solving real-world problems. Ask any professional engineer .. I asked such an engineer at the very same utility municipality I used to work for in Michigan mentioned before: “What about catastrophic system failure? Have we invested the failure-cost into prevention?” You should know the answer by how greedy and with such lack of foresight, humans can be. Those are the primary reasons we have avoided correct implementation of the approach.

Greed and lack of foresight can be powerful forces in this world. This missalette is an effort to combat those. The true power lies not in its sub-processes, but the awareness that most systems are dynamical. They contain some sort of feedback loop within them, built into their very structure. The systems approach, properly implemented, is itself dynamical. The product of the systems approach is, in general, the design of a new product or service. That design may not be optimal in terms of over-all cost. Lets take a real-world example.

Last night I was holding a beer and having this exact conversation with my wife, Moonhee. I said, “Look at this beer. There are three kinds of costs associated with it: cost of production (including distribution), cost to consumer, and environmental cost. Ideally, we need to produce the highest possible quality beer while minimizing those other costs.” I said this not for me, a consumer. It is for the survival of our species that I type these words. (Now you know the suffering a woman has to endure when her husband has an engineering mind.)

Seriously, if we don’t apply the systems-reliability approach to most of our complex real-world human systems, we are doomed with a capital ‘D’. If we don’t stop exploiting the planet and each other - as if the world were our own private dump-site/goldmine - as if it’s okay to treat each other with any measure of disrespect, we are surely Doomed .. I promised myself I would not preach in this missalette, but I cannot speak of such things without my body shaking with the realization that we are screwing ourselves.

I am not a religious man; I have spent my life fighting closed minds. What I have come to realize is that I cannot fight closed minds. I have to gently open them. But the critical factor is - there has to be a crack - a small opening with which I can lever myself inside. ‘You cannot save someone who does not want to be saved’ is so true .. I am not religious, but I still believe in God; I can still pray for humanity to open their minds and embrace the systems-reliability approach.

I know, it’s easier to act like an ostrich and put our collective head in the sand, hoping for a better day. But the picture is more accurately portrayed by one with his neck twisted around with his head up his own butt. Imagine humanity as an ostrich - with his head up his own butt, is that any way to live? If you’re laughing, perhaps I have found an opening in your mind. If this paper is burning in your hearth, I can only pray for our race .. In an effort to “combat the forces of darkness”, to open people’s minds, to stop wasting resources and time, to band together - people of all races and religions, I found this new non-profit organization: Human Meta-Systems Corporation.