Systems Engineering Roles for a New Era

Nearly thirty years ago, a classic paper was written that described systems engineering in terms of twelve roles (actually eleven plus an “other”). (Sheard, 1996) That paper is still being cited today, and the ResearchGate site reported it surpassed 20,000 reads on their site alone, including 46 citations since 2020. Yet model‐based systems engineering, digital engineering, ubiquitous agile, DevSecOps, intense sociotechnical systems, and global systems of distributed architectures were nonexistent or at best newborn when that paper was written. Furthermore, an easily adopted kind of artificial intelligence appeared on the systems engineering stage around 2015 and exploded beginning in about 2020. This paper updates the roles in the 1996 paper to provide a clearly‐still‐needed set of systems engineering roles consistent with today's systems engineering reality. With these roles, practitioners, managers, and those working with systems engineers have a description of what needs to be done to engineer 21 st century systems and a means to negotiate who performs what tasks for which system levels. This allows a more complete set of system agreements and better operating complex systems.