System Engineering: An Overview of Complexity's Impact

System engineering is partly concerned with systemic properties of engineered products. Process improvement concerns have shifted attention toward system engineering's process artifacts, road maps, and metrics. This laudable emphasis aims for process improvement, hopefully still connected with obtaining good systems. However, it risks decline in relative attention to system properties of the engineered product. This paper returns to characteristics separating system thinking from other aspects of engineering, and makes explicit those structures often left to intuition. This leads to a specific approach, class and containment hierarchy based meta-architecture, which can explicate and retool the art-even if as process improvement.