Message from the EDS President

 

Renuka P. Jindal

Steve Hillenius

Message from the EDS President With this message, I would like to update you all on the EDS activities with respect to our plans for the future. At the June 2002 EDS Administrative Committee (AdCom) Meeting Series, we held a strategic planning meeting to discuss where would like the Society to be in the next five years. The IEEE, semiconductor industry, universities, research institutions and the world in general are undergoing many changes that the Society needs to recognize and adapt to. The planning meeting involved the EDS Executive Committee (ExCom) and was meant to be a time to take a high level view of where we are going and put a few key actions in place to get us there. We went through a lot of discussion and finally agreed upon two key thrusts to our future activities.

The first thrust was to broaden the base of technical areas of interest and restructure the EDS technical committees. This is an effort to have the EDS be more flexible in its ability to respond quickly to technical shifts in the community and to allow the technical committees to have more leverage in influencing the Society’s directions. We came up with some specific changes to generate paths for exercising that leverage, such as predefining representatives from the technical committees to serve as meeting and journal volunteers. We also proposed to add a voting position on AdCom for a Technical Committees Chair whose function would be to represent all the EDS technical committees. This position would also be included within the membership of the EDS ExCom.

The second thrust was to ensure EDS activities reflect the current and future global trends. This represents a continuing concern that we keep the globalization of the EDS as a priority. Particularly as the pace of change for the global economy continues to accelerate, we must be sure to position the EDS to be responsive to these changes. We resolved to develop and promote activities in currently under-served regions and to maintain proportional volunteer representation in regards to all the regions. In the future, there will probably be more consolidation within IEEE Societies, so there is a need to look at overlaps and how they will affect EDS. These initiatives all require specific actions to commit to and to track so it was decided to use the ExCom meetings to monitor this progress. A strategic planning discussion item will be added to each ExCom agenda, with about one hour of time allotted. During this time, the Society’s position statements developed during the Strategic Planning Meeting will be reviewed.

I will report back to the membership on the progress in future communications. I would appreciate any comments you have and I invite the entire membership to participate in this activity.