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Roger Pollard sadly passed away on Saturday 3rd December 2011 after a short illness |
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Opening speech given during debate at Sections Congress 2011 - 22 August 2011
Since my student days, IEEE has been a foundation of my professional career and formed the basis for my network of contacts. I have always been committed to playing a full part contributing to the professional community and to share experience learned from my fellow professionals.
What I want to do today is to ask you to think about the purpose of IEEE in our lives, the way it works to support its learned society role and its future. We need to make sure that, as our professional association, IEEE supports our aspirations to apply technology to solve the world's problems and to make the world a better place for us all.
Today all professional societies, not least IEEE, face a set of fundamental challenges. First and foremost they have relied on publishing to generate revenues to support the member services they are committed to deliver that cost more than the revenue from membership dues alone. This is particularly problematic as the business models we have long used for publishing come under increasing strain. The information we need is now more widely available from a greater range of providers. The market for providing this information is now much larger and increasingly competitive. We have to operate in a world where many people believe that all scientific and technical information should be available on the internet for free to the user, ignoring the fact that someone else has to pay to create it, collect it, publish it and support the infrastructure to keep it available online. It is vitally important that we change and improve the way in which we deliver information. We already provide the highest-quality, peer-reviewed articles that are an essential tool for the research community and we must continue to expand our coverage and improve the information content. But we also have to mine this rich resource of data and extract the "how to" and cross-disciplinary information and knowledge resource that we should be delivering for practitioners. That shouldn't stop our information services being the best in the world.
IEEE is first and foremost a member organisation, but its increased size and complexity requires sophisticated management. This can create tension between the role of members and member governance and the role of the permanent staff. Over the years, staff roles have changed from being a supporting secretariat to an executive management and marketing organization working in partnership with volunteers. However, employers are increasingly reluctant to release their employees, our members, for volunteer professional activities that do not yield an obvious return. This is true even of academics who have historically been a mainstay.
These factors add up to an even greater imbalance between the small core of active volunteers and the larger body of disengaged members who have increased expectations of services and benefits.
There has been too much focus on IEEE as a commercial provider of professional information and services and not enough focus on behaving as a representative membership organisation that concentrates on professional standards and 'learned society' activities. We begin to look like an external-facing organization that views its members as 'customers' for services and products instead of as partners in their delivery.
We don't think hard enough about our mission and purpose and the changing technological and social context. Many of the world's problems of sustainability and improving the quality of life have been talked about in terms of the "grand challenges". They are all interdisciplinary and most sit in IEEE fields of interest. We need to recognize that today's IEEE operates in individual disciplines, but it is the multi-disciplinary problems that define the real issues facing society in the 21st century. We need to encourage and support members operating in multi-disciplinary technologies outside our normal comfort zones, crossing the boundaries of existing technical societies. We must make people working in a wider range of disciplines feel at home in IEEE and open up new areas where a specific IEEE organization does not yet exist.
These are just a few of the topics which I believe need our urgent attention.
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