New solutions in systems engineering: surely more must be possible?

Please help me and vote: Imagine a system that reads your product descriptions and generates a linked glossary from them. And imagine that you can access this glossary from any website or web application. Would that be so useful that you would buy it?
Please vote now! >>

In recent years, there has been a veritable effervescence of new products from all areas of life. New medical devices, innovative software, foldable smartphones, nanobots of all kinds. However, not much of this seems to have reached product development and systems engineering, at least that's my impression. We are still using the same tools as we did ten years ago, and there are comparatively few new solutions compared to other industries. Why is that?

One possible reason could be the size of the market. In 2020, the global market for requirements management tools was only US$ 800 million small. By contrast, the market for marketing tools, to take just one example, amounted to US$ 44 billion (2019). Perhaps not a fair comparison, but understandable from an investor's perspective.

Another reason could be a lack of suffering. After all, many organizations continue to manufacture complex products. If then something goes wrongthen the problems are rarely to be found on the technical side.

More demand for people than for tools

But my guess is that there is a certain tool fatigue in product development. Many organizations know that they are lagging behind methodologically. They therefore prefer to invest in training, coaching and consulting. What's more, changing tools is usually very expensive, as it almost always involves migrating data.

Investing in people is understandable, as competent people are hard to find. But consulting companies have the same problem. This in turn means that developing organizations through training, coaching and consulting is expensive and there is a certain risk in terms of quality. What can be done?

MBSE

Model-Based Systems Engineering currently seems to be experiencing a renaissance. This is certainly partly due to the fact that many organizations can no longer manage the increasing complexity with existing approaches. However, the introduction of MBSE also requires training, coaching and consulting. MBSE only makes sense if there is at least a certain basic maturity and the company has the necessary staying power (and strategic orientation). Even if the SysML v2 with many innovative ideas coming soon, I am still waiting for new solutions on the market that differ from the status quo.

Artificial intelligence

I have been investigating for some time whether the use of artificial intelligence represents another avenue for new solutions. Artificial intelligence could, at least occasionally, replace the coach at the engineer's side. This could relieve the personnel bottleneck for a while. However, most AI systems in product development are only limited to a Evaluation of the quality of requirements. That's not enough!

How could AI effectively relieve systems engineers? Or is that even possible? Feel free to discuss in the comments below!

Photo by AbsoluteVision on Unsplash