These pages arose from a piece of work reviewing the proposed update to IEC61508 for 2008.

At that time we were also undertaking a review of configuration management practices and it became apparent that the IEC61508 2008 proposals did not address configuration management very well. We wondered whether there were other aspects of engineering that were not well addressed and in discussing this asked ourselves the question - what were the ”Fundamentals of Engineering” - clearly we would expect a safety standard such as IEC61508 to want to address these before turning its attention to the more difficult areas of software. Some other issues were fed into the IEC61508 standard development process, but by this time the topic seemed to develop a life of its own.

We had started with a premise that the Fundamentals of Engineering were well established and documented. A brief search of the internet did reveal a large number of hits, but these were exclusively to do with hardness of materials, steam saturation curves etc. nothing that related to our view of the fundamentals  i.e. the fundamental and basic processes - the things that engineers did. Searches of various international standards revealed various standards for a range of topics but nothing that defined engineering as a whole.

There is a small body of literature that attempts to define engineering from a philosophical perspective and in particular, it tries to address the question of the difference between engineering and science. It does this by discussing differences in knowledge rather than processes.

These pages then are an attempt to redress that omission. In putting them together it has challenged us to consider the questions about what an Engineer is and just what is the role of engineering in business. Neither of these have a single answer of course, but to make some progress we needed to set out some ground rules:

1. The Engineering that we are talking about, is the conventional engineering of civil, electrical, mechanical and software engineers. It is not the broader concept say embracing social or market engineering.

2. Each of the disciplines has its fundamentals, but here we are looking to the fundamentals that all disciplines share.

3. We have looked to distinguish the engineering fundamentals from the related aspects of general business and management activities. In all business contexts these are intertwined, but there are some processes that we feel are part of business management rather than engineering. That is not to say that engineers do not or should not contribute to these, but we wanted to draw a line somewhere.

We were unsure initially what use these pages would be to anybody - after all, all businesses have their processes that are more or less established and putting labels on these won’t directly help them to be more efficient or effective. There were a few uses that we believe justify the publication of this information:

1. It appears that the authors of IEC61508 were unclear about the scope of their standard in relation to engineering - these pages will help them and others attempting to make standards developments understand what work that engineering covers and what work that it doesn’t cover. It may alert them to aspects of engineering that they were unaware of.
2. It will help developing businesses have an understanding of the scope of engineering that they should be considering. The fundamentals are such that it seems inconceivable that any business that has an engineering context will not need to address all of the issues to some extent.
3. It will help young people understand what the full breadth of engineering is about.

It was the last item that has really motivated the publication of these pages. In our experience, graduates presenting themselves at interview for first employment do not understand these fundamentals. A little thought leads one to think that younger people and by extension, their teachers, might value some insights into the world of engineering. These pages are intended to provide this. Of course to do this effectively, these pages will need to address the context of engineering and its relationship with other business disciplines. This is addressed through a presentation of a business model.