Building the tower without climbing it: Progress in engineering systems

The Engineering Systems (ES) movement set a research agenda that transformed the field of systems engineering. By focusing on complex sociotechnical systems, the ES movement dramatically expanded the scope of the problems that could be addressed by systems engineers, drawing young scholars into the field. ES succeeded in focusing the scholarly community around the concepts of the “ilities”—nontraditional system lifecycle properties—sociotechnical complexity, and system architecture. In this article, I review some of the progress made by scholars in the field, outline directions for future work, and identify challenges facing future progress in systems engineering. Specific attention is given to approaches that emphasize the roles of abstraction hierarchies, contextual interpretation, knowledge sharing, and expertise. I also briefly address the perceived trade‐off between academic rigor and practical utility—a perennial concern in the field. In each case, a review of the literature is performed documenting the progress made by the ES community and other scholarly communities whose findings may be synergistic with ours. Finally, I conclude with a proposal for preserving the momentum started by the ES movement by suggesting a forum for diverse scholarly discourse in systems engineering.