PRESIDENT’S DESK

INFORMS President Rina Schneur rina.schneur@verizon.com

Strategic planning – thinking strategically, setting goals and deriving strategic action items and implementing them – is not easy. It requires thinking beyond the immediate future and making decisions based on assumptions, often without much data. It is even harder in a volunteer-based organization such as INFORMS, where the leadership changes frequently. Yet, strategic planning is necessary for any organization to assure it keeps evolving as things around are changing. In a volunteer organization, strategic planning is also essential to prevent the organization from shifting direction every year or two, which, regardless of the direction, is inefficient and leads to instability and inability to get to a point where some of the goals set are actually met.

In the past few year, the INFORMS Board of Directors has recognized a growing need to think and act more strategically and to have strategic planning play a larger role in the board’s agenda. In its August meeting, the board embarked upon what we hope will become a new and sustainable process of strategic planning. The intent is to establish an on-going process, which will lead to specific action items to be carried out in the immediate year. Moreover, the strategic planning will be tightly linked to the budget process, so that budget decisions will reflect the strategic goals and the necessary actions to implement them.

Since it started late this year, the Executive Committee decided to have a limited process to get started while gaining some learning experience. As a starting point, we used the current INFORMS mission and vision derived by the board and a strategic task force session in 2008 (see box).

INFORMS Executive Director Melissa Moore led the board through hours of discussions, starting with a wide range of options. As part of the limited process this year, the objective was to derive no more than two goals. Through discussions and voting we converged on the following strategic goals:

• Strategic Goal 1: INFORMS will be recognized as THE leading association for advanced analytics professionals by advancing the practice, research, methods and applications of advanced analytics, and identifying and serving analytics professionals with products and services they value.
• Strategic Goal 2: INFORMS will provide up-to-date online systems that enable and encourage access, collaboration and effective exchange of information, content, services and benefits to and among our members, potential members and those interested in knowing more about OR/MS and analytics.

Once the board concurred on the goals, it derived strategic priorities for each goal. It is important to note that these goals are NOT to replace the activities we already pursue, but rather reflect where INFORMS would like to head in the next few years and what needs to be done, above and beyond the current operation, to get there. While the intention is that these goals will lead INFORMS through the next few years, this does not mean that they are set in stone. The board will keep reviewing, revising and possibly replacing those goals. Moreover, when implementing the full process next year, it will start with soliciting input from INFORMS members and its various constituents.

The two goals are very much inter-linked and complement each other. The first goal, the “Analytics goal,” is, in fact, a formal representation of what INFORMS and the board have been pursuing in the past year, starting from the initial study through exploring analytics certification. It is therefore not surprising that certification was chosen as one of the strategic priorities for that goal. In addition, the board chose to look at the related area of continuing education in analytics. To make those successful, it would be essential to position INFORMS as the “go to organization” for advanced analytics. The third strategic priority of pursuing and supporting external engagements with government and industry reflects that need.

The second goal represents the need to align INFORMS information technology infrastructure with the social media environment growing around us. Our active IT committee, led by VP-IT Bjarni Kristjansson, has been exploring various ways to do that. The objective is to provide our members advanced ways to interact with each other, exchange ideas and material and interact with others outside INFORMS. Not only is this an important goal by itself, but it also serves very well the analytics goal, as that new social media infrastructure will provide a mechanism to disseminate analytics information and promote INFORMS’ role as an advanced analytics leader.

Each strategic priority was assigned to a group composed of staff and board members, and each group is working to translate the priorities into specific action items – with timeline and budget needs. At the next board meeting in November, the board will determine which action items to pursue in 2012 and correlate that with the 2012 budget to be finalized at the same meeting.