Belief systems in systems architecting: Method and preliminary applications

Architecting has become an important discipline within the broader context of systems engineering. The lack of a common understanding of the discipline amongst practitioners and other stakeholders, particularly in broad communities, can result in confusion, misunderstanding and inefficiencies. Methods and principles from the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) are used to define a method for investigating different approaches to systems and system of systems architecting, which we characterize as distinct ‘belief systems’. This method is applied to a number of such ‘belief systems’ encountered in applied systems architecting with the aim of clarifying their key features and promoting mutual understanding across different architecting communities.