The modern world of pervasive complex systems demands planning and management activities and approaches that are able to harness and exploit the power of systems engineering and systems thinking to successfully deliver solutions to bring about real-world benefits.
Understanding the complex and often counterintuitive behaviour of enterprises and socio-technical systems and ensuring their successful management, delivery and operation is the interest of the Technology Management Group. Understanding and exploiting the interface where the engineering and operational management disciplines meet is critical to system success and this is where we explore and operate. Realising successful systems is the purpose of systems engineers, but we provide the management, planning and organisational frameworks within which the systems engineers can operate. An education in technology management is an education in complex problem analysis and synthesis, with robust, traceable decision making across engineering and the social sciences.
Who we are
We are one of the UK’s leading groups for education and research in technology management and enterprise systems. We are interdisciplinary by design, with backgrounds and skills spanning across the physical and social sciences and are highly collaborative both with academics in our sister Systems Group, but also across Cranfield University and beyond. We apply our expertise to understanding and solving the most complex of enterprise systems and technology management problems where approaches rooted purely in the traditional disciplines are not enough for the realities of the 21st Century.
Our aim is:
“To promote a systems approach to multiple related problems in enterprise and complex systems; specifically bringing together the technological problem-solving ability of engineering and the organisational, administrative, and planning abilities of management in order to improve the operational performance of complex engineering and technology-driven enterprises.”
Our areas of expertise include technology acquisition and management; procurement and support of complex capabilities; effects-based engineering; socio-economic systems management; industrial sector network analysis and management; and the through-life management of complex enterprises.
What we do
We are interdisciplinary by design. Innovation, technological progress and ever-increasing systems integration has seen established boundaries between traditional technical disciplines blur as the modern world of complex systems continues to develop and evolve. We respond to this blurring through harnessing and applying our diverse backgrounds and technical disciplines to provide expertise that is rooted in both the physical and social sciences. From backgrounds in physics and mechanical engineering through to law, economics and politics applied across government, industry, the military and academia, our pedigree and track record is second to none.
This is reflected in our world-class and research-led teaching. Our students gain a true inter-disciplinary education, taught by skilled academics, with a single focused outcome on ensuring the successful management and deployment of complex socio-technical and enterprise systems. Whilst we are first and foremost academics pushing the boundaries and the state of the art in the field, we have extensive personal experience as practitioners and this is reflected in our teaching across our awards and extensive short course portfolio.
We tackle real-world problems and issues of the most complex kind across the world, from examining the public versus private delivery of healthcare systems, analysing multi-billion pound national infrastructure programmes, transitioning major global company thinking to embrace enterprise management principles, through to addressing everyday support and logistic concerns in developing countries and nascent companies. We pride ourselves on the deep understanding we have of our international clientele’s problems and providing them with tailored solutions across our education, research and consultancy portfolios.
We are highly collaborative with all of Cranfield’s schools and centres, and with other groups and organisations in academia, government and industry across the UK and internationally. We are trusted time and again by a wide range of national and international clients and partners, as evidenced through our extensive current teaching portfolio and our recent and ongoing research and consultancy projects.
Our people
Our staff have an unrivalled mix of experience and skills to meet the new challenges the modern systems world brings. The group has a blend of UK and International experience from the military, government, industry and academia who all have an excellent ability to influence and network both in the UK and overseas.
