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I .— - ..—. Session 2252 :

— -.. . . . . Engineering in Services

George Bugliarello Polytechnic University

Traditionally, engineering has focused on artifacts. It has done so from its early beginning in the creation of fortifications to the evolution of today’s disciplines ranging from aerospace to computer engineering to bioengineering. Common to all engineering fields are skills in problem-solving, coupled with a knowledge of mathematics and the sciences.

Today, those skills are being recognized as being also useful in domains far removed from the production of artifacts. Two important examples are financial services and merchandising. These are sectors that produce a substantial fraction of our gross national product, and, in the case of financial services, a steady positive balance of payments, but have received very little attention from engineering schools.

Engineering in Financial Services Financial services are beginning to employ engineers in growing numbers.

Basically three career paths are open to engineers in this field. The first is in the area of operations, that is the processing of financial transactions, an activity involving, e.g., telecommunications and information processing. Competitiveness in the industry is heavily dependent on efficiency in carrying out transactions and on finding ever more effective ways of reaching and serving customers. For example, the ability of the New York Stock Exchange to process today a peak of some 500 million shares a day has been critical to the Exchange’s continuous primacy over other exchanges abroad. To remain competitive the Exchange is aiming at a capability of 1 billion shares a day by the year 2000, a goal requiring continuing advances in hardware, software, and telecommunications.

The second career path open to engineers in financial services is in the evaluation, modeling and design of financial transactions, from derivatives to debt instruments and equities. Engineers bring to these activities a combination of problem-solving, mathematical and software design skills, and have become, together with computer scientists, mathematicians, and other quantitative oriented scientists, the backbone of the ability of the financial industry to develop ever more sophisticated financial products.

A third and rarer opportunity for engineers is to pursue the most dynamic and risky career in the financial industry by becoming traders - usually from a background in capital markets. Trading has become an increasingly sophisticated activity favoring practitioners with a good grounding in the modeling and mathematics of finance.

-. . fiii’> 1996 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings ‘.JRTy’.’

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Bugliarello, G. (1996, June), Engineering In Services Paper presented at 1996 Annual Conference, Washington, District of Columbia. 10.18260/1-2--6028