SKA engineering operations establishment challenges, opportunities, and focus areas for early action

The steady state operational availability and resources modelled for Square Kilometre Array (SKA) assume that necessary engineering operations systems are in place and can be effectively managed. The trend however is for this state to be reached only many years after Telescope commissioning. Implementation gaps in engineering operations cost working time and can be particularly hard to resolve during operations. The pre-cursor histories and lessons learned offer knowledge and opportunity to mitigate. The paper explores challenges and opportunities for SKA engineering operations establishment. It discusses focus areas for early effort to build on the achievements and improve on challenges experienced by pre-cursor Telescopes.