Kirsten:<\/strong> Digital transformation is about how an organization operates<\/em>.<\/p>\n Jason:<\/strong> Digital transformation spans all business units. Digital engineering lives inside those focused-on building and sustaining products.<\/p>\n Digital Engineering: A Focused Discipline<\/strong><\/p>\n Jason:<\/strong> Kirsten:<\/strong> Digital transformation, on the other hand, often implies an end state. There\u2019s an idea that one day you\u2019re \u201cdigitally transformed.\u201d That framing doesn\u2019t really fit digital engineering.<\/p>\n A Question of \u201cDone\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Kirsten:<\/strong> Jason:<\/strong> Maturity, Not Checkboxes<\/strong><\/p>\n Jason:<\/strong> Kirsten:<\/strong> Those signals tell you whether you\u2019re actually practicing digital engineering or just telling yourself you are.<\/p>\n The \u201cMountain Top\u201d of Digital Engineering<\/strong><\/p>\n Kirsten:<\/strong> Jason:<\/strong> Imagine a system in the field that starts failing under certain environmental conditions. Is it the sensor? The software? The mechanical design? With a mature digital engineering approach, you can quickly diagnose the root cause, understand the downstream impact, and determine the right fix\u2014whether that\u2019s a software update, a higher spec\u2019d sensor, or a more fundamental redesign.<\/p>\n That ability to respond quickly and confidently is a powerful indicator of your digital engineering maturity.<\/p>\n A Litmus Test for Reality<\/strong><\/p>\n Kirsten:<\/strong> Jason:<\/strong> Why the Distinction Matters<\/strong><\/p>\n Kirsten:<\/strong> Jason:<\/strong> Final Thought<\/strong><\/p>\n Digital transformation sets the stage for the organization. Understanding the difference isn\u2019t just semantics. It\u2019s the foundation for building organizations that can adapt, respond, and innovate with confidence.<\/p>\n In the U.S. Aerospace & Defense industry, this distinction is especially consequential. The sector has been on a decades\u2011long digital transformation journey, with far\u2011reaching implications for how talent is recruited and developed, how programs are acquired and procured, how software is modernized, and most notably how engineering work itself is performed through digital engineering practices.<\/p>\n To better understand where organizations are focusing their efforts and where friction remains, MathWorks recently surveyed Aerospace & Defense engineers about their digital transformation priorities, challenges, and needs. The results were eye\u2011opening. In our next post, we\u2019ll share insights from that survey and explore what they reveal about the current state and future direction of digital engineering in Aerospace & Defense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIsn\u2019t digital engineering just another way of saying digital transformation?\u201d
\nWhen people talk about digital transformation<\/em>, they\u2019re usually talking about something very broad. It\u2019s an organizational shift that touches everything, not just engineering. That includes how people are trained, how business workflows operate, how acquisition processes work in aerospace and defense, and how marketing or sales systems evolve.<\/p>\n
\nExactly. I often think of digital transformation as an all-encompassing term. It\u2019s not limited to building products, it\u2019s about how the entire organization functions. For example, we\u2019ve talked internally about the digital transformation of our marketing department: how leads are captured, how they\u2019re processed, how systems talk to each other. That\u2019s digital transformation, but it\u2019s not digital engineering.<\/p>\n
\nDigital engineering, for me, is a subset of that broader transformation. It\u2019s relevant only to those teams or departments focused on designing, building, verifying, maintaining, or sustaining the engineered systems or products that define the company\u2019s value. It\u2019s about how engineering work is actually done.<\/p>\n
\nAnd that distinction matters. Digital engineering is not a project you complete and move on from. It\u2019s a way of working. Once you adopt it, you\u2019re doing<\/em> digital engineering much like adopting Model\u2011Based Design. You don\u2019t finish Model\u2011Based Design; you practice it.<\/p>\n
\nThis is where the language starts to matter. Digital transformation sounds like something you finish like flipping a switch from \u201cnot transformed\u201d to \u201ctransformed.\u201d But digital engineering doesn\u2019t work that way. It\u2019s ongoing. It\u2019s a state you strive to maintain and continuously improve.<\/p>\n
\nRight. You can transform a process to be digital, but digital engineering is how you continuously<\/em> engineer. It\u2019s not just digitalization. It\u2019s a fundamentally different approach to engineering work.<\/p>\n
\nOne helpful way to think about digital engineering is through maturity levels. You don\u2019t jump straight to an ideal state. There are stages\u2014how connected your data is, whether you have a true authoritative source of truth, how automated your processes are, how quickly you can perform impact analysis or trace changes across disciplines.<\/p>\n
\nAnd while these aren\u2019t always formal metrics, there are observable outcomes. How much manual work remains? How early in the product lifecycle do you have verification and validation steps? How quickly can teams respond to change without introducing risk?<\/p>\n
\nFor me, the \u201cmountain top\u201d of digital engineering is when engineering artifacts are simulatable, verifiable, and automatable such that they can plug directly into pipelines like CI\/CD. The more work that lives outside that system, the more waste exists in the engineering process.<\/p>\n
\nAnd that maturity really shows itself when something goes wrong.<\/p>\n
\nThat scenario works almost like a thought\u2011experiment litmus test. If this happened in your organization today, how long would it take to diagnose the issue? To understand the impact? To deploy a fix safely?<\/p>\n
\nAnd that same kind of thinking can apply to digital transformation in other areas like marketing, sales, operations. The thread looks different, but the characteristics are similar: automation, traceability, time to respond, and confidence in outcomes.<\/p>\n
\nWhen digital engineering and digital transformation are treated as the same thing, expectations get misaligned. Teams might think they\u2019re \u201cdone\u201d when they\u2019re just getting started or underestimate the ongoing discipline required to truly modernize engineering.<\/p>\n
\nSeeing digital engineering as a focused, evolving practice within a broader digital transformation helps organizations invest more intentionally. It clarifies where engineering fits and what success actually looks like.<\/p>\n
\nDigital engineering defines how engineering business units perform on that stage every day.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/files\/2026\/03\/Jason-Kirsten-Discussion-compressed.jpg\")
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\nIt\u2019s a question we hear often and one that sounds reasonable on the surface. After all, both terms are used to describe… read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":37,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/digitaleng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}