Integrated Engineering Body of Knowledge (IEBOK): A Fine Mosaic of Skills

Thomas Wendling is an advisor to the Integrated Engineering Blockchain Consortium, a professional systems engineer at Jacobs Engineering, and a cofounder of CoEngineers.io, a blockchain engineering platform cooperative.

Valuation of professional services would benefit from a more differentiated market for them. Supply, demand and liquidity are the usual factors of price, because everything that has a price has a market for it. But what if the ultimate worth of something to society were the actual determining factor of price? Not everyone realizes that this is not this way it is right now. For example, teachers do not earn salaries that are commensurate with the immense benefit that their work brings to society. This is unjust.

Intrinsic Motivation: A Double-Edged Sword

Professionals are so intrinsically motivated by their work that they sometimes flood to their fields, create a surge in supply, and depress their own “price” in the process. You can’t get away from commodity pricing if there truly is no differentiation with which to optimally reduce the supply of a good or service in the classical economics diagram.

In engineering, individuals are intrinsically motivated. At some point in their education, engineers bought the line that this was about heroes using super-human discipline to master science and math and increase the quality of life by making more time and energy available to us, create comfortable living spaces that could keep us warm in winter, move us quickly through the stratosphere above oceans, allow us to communicate globally, create the medicines that remove suffering and allow us to live longer, make us resilient to natural disasters, prevent disease from spreading through our water supplies, and to create technologies to preserve the very nature they wished to subdue.

Yes, engineering is a romantic dream pursued by many, and the helpfulness inherent at its core is what drives its most idealistic students to an ever deeper understanding of what to do to be helpful. But the academic formulation of engineering classifies and separates along broad, synthetic lines which do not fit the functional needs of the world’s demand for engineering talent. The needs of society for engineering talent require a more integrated approach for scientific and mathematical application to the world’s problems, and if allowed freedom to anneal to its natural orientation, would result in a more integrated and diversified approach to the supply of engineering talent.

The Benefits of Micro-Differentiation

Engineering has inherent in it the possibility of increased differentiation that could theoretically allow the creation of limited monopolies. Such monopolies could be made evident on and become protectable as intellectual property through blockchain technology, and would limit the supply of certain skills to a point where their valuation would not be as commodified as it currently is.

Matching of skill sets at a microscopic level has the effect of reducing supply in smaller segments of talent in a way that extracts the true value of engineering to society. Supply and demand in a truly free market acts as Adam Smith’s "invisible hand" to naturally guide the economy; however, a truly free market provides not only bakers and butchers, but a multitude of different kinds of bakers that specialize in thousands of different pastries and breads, and butchers that produce the variety of sausages, meats, and terrines that are possible, and even some that no-one knew could exist. It would provide the true spread of goods that individuals need and want. A truly free market and an entrepreneurial environment that eliminates the usual overhead friction of differentiation would allow the invention of new services and full exploration of the space of possibilities to bring value to society.

If professional services are connected only indirectly to the markets they serve, their prices will always fall to commodity levels determined by mere supply and demand of broad, undifferentiated categories of offerings. But what if demand were frictionlessly decoupled from the middle man? This is what blockchain technology offers: the possibility of creating value through professional services that match supply and demand at every level because of the elimination of the intermediary and the resulting asymmetry of information. There are engineers that have very specific skills in certain fields, and in professional services as diverse as engineering, there are as many niches of expertise as there are grains of sand on a beach. Because of blockchain technology, these highly differentiated grains of sand can become property, in the realist sense, of the individuals that create them.

One engineer may specialize in the design of rotary kiln burners, another in the material selection for gas turbine buckets, another in the manufacture of resins for ion exchange in water treatment, and many more could specialize in multiple areas by virtue of a unique education and career experience. This fine gradation and the communication of the microscopically grained mosaic of knowledge allows the supply of engineering talent to be reduced in each category to a point where, if the hiring entity were aware of it, and had the budget to purchase the specific level of service, would never settle for less. Knowledge inventory management at best cannot hope to paint the picture at the pixelated level that this integrated engineering body of knowledge IEBOK represents.

Micro-Entrepreneurship

Because there are so many different technical problems, unleashing the natural creativity of the engineer is the likely outcome of a marketplace that untethers the rigid academic classifications that constrain a free market-driven approach to solving technical problems. Meeting demand with supply at every turn that creativity takes would allow the fractal shapes that are waiting to burst, and allow a simultaneous date stamping and digital reputation to memorialize each individual’s unique contribution to an IEBOK in a way that has never been possible.

The intimate mix of entrepreneurship with technical creativity in a willing market for anything it decides is useful means instant remuneration to individuals for producing anything the market needs with a direct interface between market and the need, with communication of those needs more efficiently transmitted to its source through no intermediary that can distort the message. This represents a way to claim a stake in new territories in response to the freely expressed needs of customers who have their own ideas about what they need from an engineer to make their own projects complete.

Engineers will tell you that a big part of the study of thermodynamics involves information on the physical state of the world. The less information there is available, the more of our scarce resources are consumed in wasteful ways that do no useful work. A body of knowledge that is instantly deployed to where it is needed is a more efficient way of developing and spreading knowledge assets to the physical state of the world so that it serves us to the maximum extent possible.