The start of a new beginning – the responsible engineer
The Beginning
The financial crisis of 2007-2009 was an interesting time for all of us in automotive. I was fortunate enough during this time to have a stable position with a major OEM. However, in 2009 my wife was presented with an excellent career opportunity requiring a move outside of a major automotive region. This was before the days when remote working was a viable option within a large company. Ultimately this led to the founding of kVA with a business partner. In 2009 we didn’t talk much about autonomy, cybersecurity wasn’t a big discussion in automotive, and artificial intelligence (AI) was nearly non-existent for production vehicles. But functional safety was on the horizon as the draft of ISO 26262 was already available.
Working for a German OEM meant safety was ingrained into everything we did as engineers. In engineering we always need to make compromises, but safety was one thing we could never compromise. The passion and fire that resides inside of me for the safety of automotive comes from my early days working for this OEM. Every project I work on, I envision my children and family in that car. So, we created kVA with the vision of safety for complex products, specifically the safety of automotive electronics. During this timeframe, that was the correct purpose, as we didn’t know any differently. Notwithstanding, we don’t generally have many opportunities in life to reset our purpose. I’m now blessed to have this opportunity with the creation of SecuRESafe, known as SRES, to renew this vision from 2009.
Fast-forwarding to today, the key missing ingredient from our 2009 purpose is responsibility. We not only need to make safe products, but we need to develop responsibly safe products. We not only need to make secure products, but we need to develop responsibly secure products.
Safety with Good Intentions
We need to practice deploying safety and security with good intention, fairly impacting society to allow for scalability with future confidence. Ethics, bias, trust all directly impact the lives of those most important to us. We have recently seen the explosion of generative AI. If we don’t develop safety related products responsibly, everyone is at too high of a risk as the scalability of AI is beyond anything we have ever had to comprehend as human beings. To be truthful, responsibility was always there, even in 2009, however it was somewhat masked. It has been the amplification of responsibility through AI that now has made it clearly relevant, unmasking its importance.
Today!
At SRES we not only support functional safety, autonomy safety and cybersecurity, but we promote and are evangelists for responsible development. Being responsible is the sun for safety and security. We are in the midst of yet another paradigm shift in our industry – this requires engineering, safety, cybersecurity and quality leaders within every organization to return to first principles and deeply understand the dependencies and trade-offs between state-of-the-art technical standards and best practices to build a holistic product development process. The margins for error are slim – organizations that foster a culture of responsibility and continuous improvement will dominate the next decade.
Our purpose is partnering with clients to develop responsibly safe and secure products. — Secure. Responsible. Safe. SecuRESafe. SRES.
