The Human Viewpoint for System Architectures

This book describes a methodology to represent socio-technical system concerns in the system architecting process. The resulting set of Human Views augments traditional system viewpoints with human-focused data. The Human Viewpoint methodology classifies the socio-technical system context, identifies and collects pertinent data, renders models that can be used for discussion and analysis, and presents the results in Fit for Purpose views that are useful for decision making. The inclusion of the Human Viewpoint during the system architecting stage allows the evaluation of human-system design trade-offs, recognises the impact of the human operator on system performance, and provides the foundation for Human System Integration evaluations during the ensuing system development.

Holly A. H. Handley is an Associate Professor in the Engineering Management and System Engineering Department at Old Dominion University. Her education includes a BS in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson College (1984), a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley (1987) and a MBA from the University of Hawaii (1995). She received a PhD in Information Technology and Engineering from George Mason University in 1999. Dr. Handley is a Licensed Professional Electrical Engineer from the state of Washington. She is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Senior Grade, the International Council on System Engineers (INCOSE) and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES).  

Dr. Handley applies systems engineering principles and experience in computational modeling to conduct research and perform analysis on challenging problems of complex socio-technical systems. Her research has been funded by the Office of Naval Research, SPAWAR Systems Center, and the Army Research Laboratory. Dr. Handley has performed analyses on human-centered architectures to illustrate how role relationships change as organizations adapt to new technologies. She has identified metrics to evaluate distributed role performance as well as standardized engineering products to represent human-centered issues in system design. Dr. Handley participated in a multi-national panel to develop the Human Viewpoint to augment system engineering design products to assist in the modeling and simulation of socio-technical systems.

Dr. Handley began her career as a Design Engineer at Raytheon Submarine Signal Division in Portsmouth, RI. She then accepted a position as a CMOS Application Engineer at Raytheon Semiconductor Division in Mountain View, CA, and later became a Senior Field Engineer in Vicenza, Italy. After completing a post doctoral position as a Research Associate Professor at the System Architecture Laboratory at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, Dr. Handley became a Principal Investigator at Pacific Science & Engineering Group in San Diego, CA.