A Need for Visionary Systems Engineering: The Visioneer

The United States' national economic and physical defense depends on its pro-activeness and visionary leadership. Visionary engineering and/or science leadership requires a leader to think beyond his or her normal job description when addressing an old or new technological challenge in new ways. Visionary leadership is important for creating an environment conducive for generating new holistic systems engineering ideas especially those ideas pertaining to development of a network-centric environment (NCE). In addition to development of holistic systems engineering approaches to problem solving and for NCE, a visionary engineering and/or science leader also should have the ability to recognize creativity and provide his/her creative workforce the space needed to thrive and express their originality. This will be especially true regarding NCEs and for shifting the paradigmatic thinking about systems engineering. Without doubt, as the idea of NCE grows it will require scientists and engineers (S&Es) to address challenges that were never before considered to be technological science and engineering problems such as those relating to people, training, education, sociology, psychology, etc. As we interconnect more people, the social sciences and education are also most likely to become the challenges that could be most difficult for technological S&Es to handle. The visionary leader might therefore create an environment where new holistic systems engineering ideas and experimentations could be and are rewarded, and he/she could demonstrate his/her appreciation by example. The authors paraphrase, Former Secretary of the United States Air Force, Dr. James Roche's comments about visionary leadership by stating the following: adversaries, while still assuring our friends and allies. This fluid setting underscores the need for doctrinal agility, and expeditious and responsive acquisition, planning, and execution across the spectrum of capabilities in support of homeland security - from the most difficult anti-access scenario to humanitarian relief. As new generations of technology proliferate among potential adversaries, we also are reminded of the need to keep pushing technology forward (Roche, 2003)