The digital thread: SE arguments for decision-makers

One of the many buzzwords these days is the "digital thread". This means that all data from the product life cycle is linked together and can be used in a meaningful way. To make this possible, we need traceability. The image of the digital thread is a good way for systems engineers to communicate the relevant concepts to management.

Traceability vs. digital thread

While traceability is a technical concept, the digital thread is an image. Images are well suited to communicating with decision-makers. In addition, the image conveys a benefit, namely to find a way, as the ancient Greeks already knew.

Traceability, on the other hand, is a technical term and enables important use cases. However, decision-makers often find it difficult to assess the value of a technical concept for business success. The term "digital thread" helps with translation and communication with management.

What keeps decision-makers awake at night

Decision makers are not really interested in "coverage" or "suspect links". They care about risks such as product delays, defects, cost overruns, failed verifications and validations, recalls, etc. And here we can argue that end-to-end process visibility is needed for better cross-team collaboration and early detection of anomalies.

In the minds of decision-makers, we do not find individual, interlinked requirements. The images in their heads are corrupt supply chains, data silos and interrupted processes. All of this can be visualized well with the image of the digital thread.

Concretization in systems engineering

We need to communicate to decision makers that the digital thread is the best approach to reduce the risk of negative product outcomes while maintaining technical autonomy and productivity. An often-cited definition of the digital thread comes from a 2018 paper by Singh and Willcox, Engineering Design with Digital Thread. There they define the term as follows:

Digital Thread: A data-driven architecture that links together information generated from across the product lifecycle and is envisioned to be the primary or authoritative data and communication platform for a company's products at any instance of time.

Engineering Design with Digital Thread

We can now interpret this definition in the context of systems engineering:

• Data-driven architecture: In the SE context, this means that we need data in order to be able to work. The better this data supports our use cases, the better. The trend is moving towards machine-readable, structured data. The goal here would be a complete system model. In practice, our system description still consists of a lot of text, which is usually not machine-readable.
• Combines information across the entire product life cycle: Secondly, we are still a long way from a complete model. In practice, there are still Many breaks between toolsthat cannot be easily bridged.
• The primary or authoritative data and communication platform: This should be the goal, especially the reduction of redundancies. This goes hand in hand with the previous topic, integration.
• The correct product information at all times: Another dimension is versioning or baselining, configuration management and dealing with changes.

Conclusion

Like many other buzzwords, the digital thread is already pretty well worn out. But in systems engineering, we have a very concrete idea of how the digital thread manifests itself in our work. And that's why "digital thread" is a useful term for communicating with decision-makers.

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash