Systems Engineering in Retirement

There are many opportunities throughout our society for experienced systems engineers to continue to apply their engineering skills in retirement.  It might be that most of these activities won't have a large impact, and will be primarily for your own entertainment.  But that's not all bad, either.  Studies shows that keeping one's mind active with games, puzzles, learning a new language, etc. is important for seniors, to maintain mental acuity and prevent or delay dementia.  My preference of “games” are Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, and my puzzles are public policy issues in which I have been applying my skills in small to larger activities.

On the small side, online surveys and web sites provide many opportunities to help companies make incremental improvements.  Many online surveys don't satisfy a key requirement:  the range of potential answers they provide is incomplete, and they don't provide a mechanism for the survey responder to provide an accurate answer.  Often, the survey lacks a fill-in answer.  More often, the survey lacks the "not applicable" option, which applies far more frequently than the survey designers seem to expect.  In these cases, I send a message to the survey organization, informing them of their omission; usually, I receive at least a courteous response.

Free wi-fi at coffee houses and stores is another area where a key requirement is sometimes not satisfied:  data transfer speed is sometimes too slow to be usable.  At a popular chain of coffee houses and at a well-known department store, I noticed the wi-fi speed was slow.  I measured it at about 1Mb/s, which is much too slow for any useful web access.  I sent messages to both companies.  The coffee house sent a response that they plan to upgrade the wi-fi in all of their stores by the end of 2015.  I have not yet heard back from the department store.

In a medium scope instance:  The City of Palo Alto wants to make certain streets safer for bicycles.  Their initial solution for our street, somewhat of a thoroughfare for two elementary, one middle, and one high school plus Stanford, would have made driving and even biking on our street very slow and possible even more hazardous.  My opinion was that the solution, transferred from more densely populated towns in Europe, far exceeded the requirements for improved safety on our street.  I expressed that opinion to the planning department.  I don't know if my opinion carried any weight, but the city is now proposing a much simpler and less intrusive solution.

On the larger side, I am interested in public works and public policy issues.  In one instance, I am disappointed with the current high speed rail / Caltrain solution for our Peninsula.  The current plan is that in 2029 - another 14 years from now - all that will be achieved is an electrified "blended" solution using mostly the current Caltrain tracks.  This will not achieve at least what should be three major goals of Peninsula transportation - truly high speed transportation (grade level crossings reduce allowed speeds), less noise (more trains will mean more train horns at those crossings), and reduced automobile traffic impacts (grade-level crossings interrupt traffic flow).  I am revising a PowerPoint presentation to encourage the reconsideration of an elevated solution along the Caltrain right of way, but one that would address the visual esthetics of the solution, to counter some of the primary objections from past years.

Our nation's legislators - at the state level and Congress - also need solutions based not just on platitudes and ideology, but solutions that are based on engineering approaches and data.  Perhaps one could call this, not political science as taught in universities, but "political engineering".  I intend to analyze problems, and then develop, suggest, and discuss with community leaders and legislators politically-engineered approaches to taxation, the Federal budget and debt government regulations, and other issues.

However, our nation certainly has many small to very large problems that need well-engineered solutions for the 21st century, and the insight of retired systems engineers could well help achieve those solutions.

By Mike Forster

INCOSE SFBAC Member