Good question.   I am claiming that D-OA is a very powerful tool that engineers can use to be more productive and have more fun working but that it is not widely taught and does not appear to be widely used even though many people have taken the "Technical Therapy" course and came away thinking that D-OA is a great tool.  How can that claim make sense?  How is that consistent with what makes economic sense?  Wouldn't more productivity lead to more business success and growth?  Wouldn't companies using D-OA grow faster and attract more of those productive engineers who enjoy their work?  Wouldn't the other companies then catch on?  Wouldn't the electronics industry then work with academia to produce more of those productive and happy engineers so that the companies would remain competitive?

For me, this conundrum is mostly resolved by noting that the electronics industry has a great deal of momentum in being successful without D-OA.  The experienced individual engineer who is all excited after taking the "Technical Therapy" course goes back to work in an organization that still has the same project deadlines as existed before the engineer spent time away from work to attend the course.   There are still those fires that were burning before the engineer went to the course and then those new fires that keep flaring up.  This situation is similar to but not identical to the situation the engineer experienced in that first design project after college.  Back then, the engineer resorted to guess and check to produce the output.  Now the engineer has intuition resulting from years of experience.  In a sense, the engineer is a better guesser.  In both situations, taking the time to figure out how to use the analysis tools is a lower priority than the requirement to get the finalized schematics to the layout engineer by "this Friday."

The remaining part of the resolution to the conundrum has to do with the nature of D-OA itself.  D-OA is a type of analysis by humans with which humans can manage their understanding of the system being analyzed.  This is in contrast to the type of analysis generally taught in circuit analysis courses which is an algorithmic analysis excellent for computer computation but not useful for humans to manage their understanding of the system.  D-OA is not algorithmic.  The practitioner of D-OA makes decisions about how to proceed with the analysis based on the particular purpose for the doing the analysis.  Some people might be tempted to think of this facet of D-OA as being "not straightforward" and therefore somehow not generally applicable or practical.   I see the role of the D-OA practitioner in making choices during the analysis as the key which allows the person to generate meaningful and therefore useful results.  D-OA is a tool which people can use to add value in a way that computers still cannot.

Page updated by Garrett Neaves on January 22, 2010