PRESIDENT'S DESK

INFORMS President Rina Schneurrina.schneur@verizon.com

With the INFORMS elections underway, I would like to give you a peek into the INFORMS Board, its makeup, how it operates, what types of decisions it has been facing and what areas it is about to tackle.

The INFORMS Board is comprised of 14 members – three presidents, a secretary, a treasurer and nine vice presidents. The president, elected every year, serves a three-year term – one year as president-elect, one as president and one as past-president. The treasurer, secretary and seven of the VPs (Educations, IT, Marketing & Outreach, Meetings, Membership, Practice and Publications) are each elected for two-year terms. After a first term, a VP can run for one more term, usually unopposed. A committee chaired by the past-president nominates the candidates on the ballot, and a vote of the general membership determines the winners. The other two VPs – Chapters and Sections & Societies – are elected by the Subdivision Council for a single two-year term.

The Board meets four times a year. The fall and spring meetings co-locate with the corresponding conference, while the winter and summer meetings are often held near INFORMS headquarters in Baltimore, Md. While not having a voting right, the INFORMS executive director and staff directors participate in most meetings. The meetings are run by the president, who votes only in a tie-breaking situation.

Decisions that cannot wait for the next board meeting are resolved via an e-mail vote of the Board following a review period of relevant material. To further assure continuity between board meetings, the Executive Committee – comprised of the three presidents (past, current and elect), secretary and treasurer, as well as the executive director – meets at least once a month. The Executive Committee typically deals with more “operational issues” brought up by the executive director, financial reviews and “small-scale” funding decisions. Anything else goes before the full Board.

The Board meetings typically last 10 to 12 hours. One of the challenges in running the meeting is to keep it focused, efficient and timely, while covering what’s needed in sufficient depth to allow for informed decisions. Sometimes the decisions are quick and unanimous – practically a formality; other times heated discussions ensue, producing a variety of views, multiple motions and majority decisions.

The topics on the table span everything from ongoing procedural votes to one-time decisions to more strategic discussions. The procedural topics often evolve around the modifications of the P&P (policies and procedures – the document that governs INFORMS, its various elements, processes, roles and responsibilities), as well as the appointment of committees and chairs. The one-time decisions could be a proposed award or a suggested collaboration with another organization.

The budget is a whole category by itself and takes a significant portion of the Board’s time. The budget is a critical element not only because one of the Board’s main responsibilities is to assure INFORMS’ financial well-being, but because it reflects the activities and focus areas of INFORMS. The budget is discussed in some form at every meeting. By the fall meeting the Board must approve the budget for the following year. The budget process starts early in the year and includes: taking input from all appropriate continuants; looking at modifications to ongoing activities including renewing, increasing or eliminating them; and incorporating observed “realities” by the staff. The Board is in the process of revising this process to make it tightly linked to our strategic planning and direction.

Making decisions about strategic activities and initiatives is a challenge in every organization, and more so for a professional society where the leaders are volunteers who come and go often. Strategic activities typically span a relatively long time horizon, and hence have the challenge of continuity as they involve more than one Board and more than one budget cycle. Moreover, embracing a major new activity or change of direction involves risk, with little or no history or data upon which to base a decision.

Ideally, the Board should focus more of its time on such topics. To head in that direction, we are developing a strategic planning process. At the next Board meeting in August, the executive director will lead the Board through some strategic planning discussions and decision-making that will be followed by a full-scale strategic planning cycle tightly linked with our budget cycle. A new journal, tapping into Web 2.0 and the extent and form of the Institute’s expansion into the analytics space are the main strategic areas currently facing the Board. At the August meeting, the Board will also discuss the findings of a study and survey on a certification program. Whether to launch such a program is an example of the challenging questions the Board faces with strategic activities because it requires a multi-year commitment of funding and resources, as well as cultural changes.

Finally, I would like to note that while the Board members have large responsibility and devote considerable time to their activities, they would not be able to do a good job without the tremendous help they receive from the staff, as well as from the many committee members who are volunteering their time to focus on specific important activities.