This is what I wrote when applying to SDM@MIT.
I wish to join the System Design and Management Program at MIT in order to learn more about system architecting and management of large-scale product development and to widen my career possibilities.
My motivation to study system design and management arises particularly from my experience as a system architect in Nokia Networks. I am especially interested in the SDM Program because it combines both system design and management. It is my conviction that successful large-scale product development requires knowledge of these both aspects. The SDM Program provides a unique opportunity to study them jointly.
My interest in system design derives both from my professional experience and from my educational background. I have a master.s degree in theoretical philosophy from the University of Helsinki. In my studies, I specialized in logic, foundations of computer science and logical linguistics. (As minor subject, I have studied mathematics.) Philosophy and logic deal with large conceptual systems. In my work as a software and system architect, I have found my conceptual skills invaluable in understanding and developing large systems. I also think that my educational background can enrich the SDM class.
For the last 3.5 years, I have been working as a system architect in Nokia Networks. In Nokia, I belong to a group of five system architects that has developed the system architecture for Nokia.s 3G WCDMA network elements Radio Network Controller and Media Gateway. I have worked especially on the platform on which we implement the network elements. This platform is a distributed embedded computer system, which consists of more than 1000 computing and traffic processors. On the technical level, my work concerns system performance, system start-up, high availability, internal messaging, system configuration and dimensioning, and traffic engineering.
Since January 2003, I have been leading a group of nine Chinese system architect apprentices in Hangzhou, China.
The fact that our reseach and development is geographically dispersed and done by teams both in Finland and in China has created completely new challenges for our system architecting. I have had to pay special attention on the system architecting methods, documentation, and processes.
My motivation to study further the topics concerning system design and management derives especially from the challenges I have faced during my work as a system architect and group leader in product development.
In my experience, most of the problems in the large-scale product development derive exactly from the fact that too few persons have knowledge on both system architecting and management. Although technical problems are usually difficult, I think the most important reasons for the problems such as being late, over budget or of poor quality, are not technical. It seems to me that most difficult problems are often due to insufficient professional skills in leadership and management on both project and personnel level. This insufficiency yields non-optimal organizations, wrong planning, and over-optimistic schedules.
I believe that it is possible to develop large systems, such as telecommunication network elements, much faster and cheaper than we are able to do now. However, this requires deep knowledge on both system architecting and management and ability to combine these aspects.
In the future, I wish to be able to use my skills and knowledge in large-scale industrial projects. I would like to use my current experience and the new skills and knowledge I will learn in SDM at MIT in finding new, better architecting and management methods and processes.
I also find the issues concerning system design and management academically highly interesting. In the future, I would like to be able split my time between academic research and industrial projects. It is my wish to participate in developing the methods and processes, and ultimately, also theory of system architecting and its management.
I still believe what I wrote in May 2004.
16.12.2004