Welcome to the New IOL

On behalf of the core team of INFORMS staff, volunteers, and consultants who have been working to redesign the parent INFORMS website, welcome. This is it.

We are quite proud of the redesign and hope you will be, too. Shortly, I will share with you our overall strategy and point out many of the new features and where we hope to eventually take IOL with your help. Mohan Sodhi, editor-in-chief of IOL, has ably shared with you many of these points already in the pages of OR/MS Today over the last two years, and I invite you to revisit his comments.

But first a word of caution. The new website is not quite finished. Some areas of the new website are still lacking in information and the ultimate formatting we are trying to achieve. We will continue to work on these areas. Our strategy has always been to launch the new website by a set date (today) that we felt would enable us to present a nearly complete site, while at the same time promoting this date in advance so a clean break can be made. We hope you will bear with us. The Awards section of IOL (or as it is now known, the Recognizing Excellence section) has proven to be especially vexing because we have so many different types of awards with various categories of winners, finalists, runners-up, and participants. We are confident that very soon we will have this section in shape.

We would like to hear from you. At the very top of the homepage you’ll see a FEEDBACK button. Your comments will go directly to the core team working on this project and will be considered. This is your website. We understand that our website will always be evolving and never actually finished. That is how it should be. This new website design and infrastructure really represents the third in a series of iterative improvements that have been made over the years. We do hope, however, that this overall structure and presentation will live on for a long time and provide both members and guests with a pleasing and information-packed experience. We believe we now have both a front-end and back-end structure in place to serve us into the future.

We also need your help. Volunteers are not only needed to advise and help with content creation for existing areas of the new website, but also for new content and new directions the website may take. If you are interested in volunteering to help with the new site, please mention that in your feedback.

Much of the time spent on this redesign was dedicated to choosing a new content management system to better serve our needs and to migrating content on our old website under our old content management system to our new website and new CMS. We believe our new content management system – EZ Publish – is not only easy to use for content contributors (it is well named) but also has all the features that will serve us well –

• open source so we can avoid license fees and share our enhancements with the overall user community,
• well established U.S.-based customer service,
• a permissions-based workflow,
• the ability to share content throughout the site in appropriate places,
• single sign-on so once you log on to the website and have access to members-only areas, you are also logged on to our association management system and can manage your membership account,
• members to connect with each other and share information more easily, and
• the ability to leverage social networking features such as this blog, polls, and fora. These are just some of the features that drew us to EZ Publish.

Among the key features of the overall website that we hope you will come to know and appreciate include

• a clearer, more user friendly site navigation that was developed by users through card sorting exercises and focus groups,
• audience-based sections of the website that call out information and resources of particular interest to academics, practitioners, students, and international members and guests,
• easier access to breaking INFORMS and OR/MS news,
• a sampling of premium content from our journals featured on front page,
• upgraded calendar of events with a robust dedicated search function,
• an improved site search capability using Google and the ability to limit searches to certain collections within IOL,
• helpful links to related content throughout the site,
• a uniform look across all INFORMS websites (each Community whether it is hosted by INFORMS or not now has a landing page within IOL that assures visitors they are still viewing INFORMS information), and last but not least
• a new member dashboard where you can see all of your INFORMS publications, communities and other INFORMS resources all in one place. We hope to build out the member dashboard in the future to become a gateway to access and manage your INFORMS resources and to serve as a repository for your own research. HELPFUL HINT: Please log in to access the Member Dashboard, which can be found (after login) in the Membership section or by clicking on your name that will appear at the top of the home page after logging in.

Our overall goal is to make our new website the main marketing channel for INFORMS that will measure and grow member engagement and attract potential members. Other key marketing goals of the redesign include:

• enhance the value of membership with strategically-placed members-only features,
• enhance outreach efforts and promote the profession with regular news feeds, pertinent and timely information, and selling tools,
• migrate more marketing efforts to the web such as word of mouth marketing, volunteer recruiting, and an eventual rewards and recognition program,
• fully leverage the new association management system with personalization, and
• improve the overall INFORMS brand experience online with user-centered navigation and design.

Thank you to the project’s core team which includes IOL editor-in-chief Mohan Sodhi and assistant editor-in-chief Matt Saltzman who provided wonderful leadership; INFORMS staff including Director of IT Randy Kiefer, Staff Webmaster, Shirley Mohr, and Assistant Web Designer David Wirth; and our consultants, Beaconfire. Much of the INFORMS staff assisted in cleaning up and populating numerous web pages including Mary Magrogan and her Communities staff, Betsy Fruhling, Barry List, Pat Shaffer and Miranda Walker and their Publications staff, and the Marketing staff including Tom Fink, Mary Leszczynski, and Rafael McFadden. If I missed any staff, I hope you will forgive me. Thank you to INFORMS Executive Director Mark Doherty for his leadership and wisdom as we undertook and carried out this mammoth project. A special thanks to the INFORMS Board of Directors led by President Don Kleinmuntz who offered support (and money) along the way. Their wisdom in agreeing to make this investment and advise in its completion will surely serve INFORMS very well into the future.

In this space in coming weeks you’ll see blog posts from several members experienced in blogging including IOL editor-in-chief Mohan Sodhi. We hope you will check back frequently to participate and post comments.