Systems, Man & Cybernetics - October 2015 - 22

Participants in the 2014 norbert Wiener Panel Session. From left: V. Kreionovich, panel organizer; W. rouse,
K. Hipel, L. a. zadeh, D. Filev, J. del r. millán, L. Hall, and W. gruver, panelists.

students, as well as over ten years of
being rated the top program in the
country, provided him an opportunity
to impact the broader profession.
His individual research portfolio at Georgia Tech soon included
option-based valuation of publicsector investments, organizational
implications of emerging information
technologies, and immersive organizational simulations. More broadly,
he sought to bring the enterprise perspective to academia. His leadership
in founding the Tennenbaum Institute
manifested this perspective. This
cross-university endeavor brought together artists and architects, economists and engineers, and many other
disciplines to address the fundamental nature of transformational change
in large private- and public-sector
enterprises. Many of these endeavors
are discussed in People and Organizations: Explorations of HumanCentered Design (Wiley, 2007).
Even Stevens
Rouse retired from Georgia Tech in
2012. Two weeks later he joined the
22

faculty of the School of Systems and
Enterprises at Stevens Institute of
Technology as the Alexander Crombie Humphreys Chair in Economics
of Engineering. He also founded the
Center for Complex Systems and
Enterprises (CCSE), a campuswide
research center focused on complex
public-private systems using both
computational modeling and casebased research. Much of this research
is discussed in Understanding and
Managing the Complexity of Healthcare (MIT Press, 2014) and Modeling
and Visualization of Complex Systems and Enterprises: Explorations
of Physical, Human, Economic, and
Social Phenomena (Wiley, 2015).
A key asset of the CCSE is the Immersion Lab, which shows an interactive simulation of the health-care
delivery ecosystem of New York City.
The group is exploring the likely consequences of alternative merger and
acquisition strategies among the 66
hospitals in this ecosystem.
Rouse's career began with more
than a decade of research on operators
and maintainers of complex systems,

IEEE SyStEmS, man, & CybErnEtICS magazInE October 2015

both in terms of understanding and
modeling their performance and by
devising training and aiding systems
to support such personnel. His second decade of research emphasized
the work of designers and researchers, particularly focused on how the
outputs of research can, but often do
not, serve as valuable inputs to design.
His third decade addressed managers
and executives, emphasizing critical
strategic tasks and how to support this
work. In his fourth decade, he focused
on the whole enterprise. In the fifth
and current decade, he is addressing
complex public-private enterprises
like health-care delivery, urban resilience, and research universities.
As he has transitioned from one domain to another, he has often encountered questions about why he was leaving the field. He typically responded
by saying that he was expanding the
field, not leaving it. Human-centered
design, he argued, applies to all human
activities, ranging from maintaining
aircraft engines to leading global enterprises. The central notions are to
consider the whole system, identify

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Systems, Man & Cybernetics - October 2015