History of Science and Technology Systems Engineering: The Histneer

Abstract

This paper takes a holistic systems engineering approach toward addressing the need to consolidate human intellectual capital (called history of science & technology) with scientific and technological history of science and technology (HS&T) (for devices, machines, and processes), along with configuration management for individualized project management and systems engineering technology development efforts. The authors define HS&T as a field of history that examines how our (that is, humanity's) understanding of science and technology has changed over the years. They argue that without such an understanding, development of new technologies could have been improbable. They further describe HS&T as a field of history that studies the cultural, economic, and political impacts of scientific and technological innovation. They define configuration management to be a discipline that applies technical and administrative direction and surveillance to: (1) identify and document the functional and physical characteristics of a scientific and technological configuration item; (2) control changes to those characteristics or attributes pertaining to scientific and technological devices, machines, and processes; and (3) record and report changes to processing and implementation status of scientific and technological devices, machines, and processes. They further describe present-day configuration management to be based upon the physical and some aspect of the informational domain along with a machine-centered sub-domain; and that this is incomplete. The authors argue that from a holistic systems engineering perspective, the majority of the informational domain and plausibly all of the cognitive and social domain in addition to the application- and human-centered sub-domain appear to be overlooked according to present-day configuration management concepts relating to the technology development process. As a plausible solution, they advocate there should be a real-time history of science & technology systems engineer (or histneer-1-) team member working as part of an integrated product team (IPT). That the histneer team member, as part of the system or technology development team, could be responsible for gathering and documenting all aspects of the acquisition development process whether its human performance and recollection data; machine and software data; modeling, simulation and analysis data; ideational data, conceptual data, sociological data, psychological data, and war fighting data related to actual applications of developed technology during combat