Founder’s background: Anne O’Neil advises industries and organizations seeking to adopt systems practices and apply systems engineering (SE) capability to achieve and improve business outcomes. She counsels the increasingly diverse range of industries facing complexity and integration challenges as a result of deploying technology, software-intensive and communications-intensive systems. Supported industries have included automotive, buildings and ground transportation. She supports businesses across a spectrum of needs – from assessing where applying a systems expertise offers the strongest business benefit, to assisting internal systems capability acquisition or enhancement.
From 2005-2013 as the founding Chief Systems Engineer for New York City Transit (NYCT), Anne established and integrated SE capability to improve the agency’s capital project delivery. This required developing systems engineering discipline expertise and modifying the agency’s business process and program development approach. It also necessitated effecting change and building systems engineering awareness at an industry level – among peer transit properties, consultants, contractors and systems suppliers.
A former Board member for INCOSE, International Council on Systems Engineering, Anne served as Director of Industry Outreach. In this capacity, she reached out to industries not traditionally associated with systems engineering (SE) to support their adoption of SE practices, expansion of SE capability and greater involvement within the INCOSE SE community. She has served as a systems champion within the transportation industry, raising SE awareness. She spearheaded the evolution of the INCOSE Transportation Working Group into an international forum for industry exchange, serving 6 years as co-chair. Concurrently in 2008, she founded and chaired until 2012 the Systems Engineering Committee for APTA, American Public Transportation Association. In 2009, Anne was profiled as a systems engineer by Money magazine, boosting the recognition of the value of systems engineers across many sectors. In recognition of Anne’s extensive outreach efforts within the SE community and within the transportation industry, she was awarded the 2011 INCOSE Founders Award.
Anne joined NYCT in 2002 as Principal Communications Engineer overseeing design for new subway expansion projects, including the 8.5mile, 16 passenger station Second Avenue subway line in Manhattan, 7West line extension, plus a new terminal station and transit hub facility for lower Manhattan.
Anne has accumulated over 20 years of experience guiding large-scale organizations and program teams to successfully deploy technology-based solutions that address operational performance expectations and overall business priorities. Her career began as an electrical/control systems engineer in the power industry. She soon transitioned into the transportation industry, with the emergence of the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) field. She designed and deployed advanced traffic management systems for vehicular tunnels and highways. Her professional responsibilities have spanned the planning, design and construction phases of projects. She has served in corporate strategy, program leadership, engineering design, technical management, and construction management capacities.