Dr Bruce Fowler
MAS President
Mondays have always been my favorite day of the week because they offer such opportunity to make things happen. Fridays, on the other hand, are rather bittersweet days of acknowledging failure and success. Now I come to the last column of my term as MAS President, and I feel that I need to devote much of this column to a report on those successes and failures.
I am pleased to report that in many respects the Society is healthier today than it was two years ago. Much of this is the result of policies and initiatives put in place by my predecessors as well as by myself with the wise advice and counsel of the Executive Council of the Society.
We have successfully executed two independent national MAS meetings, 1MAS and 2MAS, will execute 3MAS as a conference-in-a-conference in November at the INFORMS National Meeting in San Antonio, and are completing the planning for 4MAS in the spring of 2001. With the change in INFORMS to concentrate their presentation component in a single fall meeting, with the spring meeting dedicated to education, we have the opportunity to regularize our national meetings in the spring and offer a MAS track at the INFORMS fall meeting.
At least partly as a result of these MAS meetings, the health of the Society has been improved in two other areas. First, and on a concrete level, both 1MAS and 2MAS were economically successful. This success translates into greater capability to extend more services to you, the membership.
Second, we have vastly increased our formal and informal connections with other organizations. These organizations include both traditional Military Operations Research firms and large, multi-component corporations that use Military Operations Research as part of their normal internal business practices, the US Army, and other professional societies. Our successes in many of our activities, including our national meetings, are in no small part due to the support accorded us by these organizations, as we have in turn contributed to their successes. We should continue to strengthen these alliances and build new ones.
We have also worked to increase our archives of professional materials for our membership. The presentations of 1MAS and 2MAS were collected in electronic proceedings and this new tradition will be continued with 3MAS. We are exploring means of making our electronic publications directly accessible to you over the web. Our professional development committee has begun to extend the scope of our publications, building on this hard gained base of publishing expertise. My successor has a strong commitment to research publication and professional development, and I have every trust that these efforts will expand and mature.
Our joint publication efforts with MORS have also been improved. We have just agreed to institute a joint award for the best paper published each year in MOR.
Additionally, we instituted the President’s Award to recognize those professionals who, in the President’s due consideration and assessment, had exceptionally contributed to the advancement and health of the Society or the Profession. Since it was inaugurated, we have presented over twenty of these awards.
Our first membership survey, conducted during the last election, confirmed that you want us to provide more professional development opportunities. We have listened! At 3MAS, we will expand the expository presentations that were part of 2MAS to a wider and broader scope. Plans are underway to increase this professional development component at 4MAS to include short courses, and to extend the availability of these and other materials over the web.
All is not positive, however. One concern that the Executive Council and I have is a slow decrease in the membership rolls. I believe this is at least partly due to the continuing downsizing of the Defense community and the increasing work demands on all of us. The Executive Council has outlined a program based on improving our services to you, advertising outreach to uncommitted members of our profession, and strengthening our multi-disciplinary foundation by outreach to the populations of cognate disciplines. This is not enough! The Society needs the help of the membership to recruit your coworkers who are not members to join. Several of our services, such as Topics in Operations Research, are available to non-members, but the Society cannot expand these services as robustly as we would like without strong member support. Let neither you nor they be "gentlemen in England now abed."
I also want to introduce my successor, Dr J.P. Ballenger. J.P. holds degrees in both Industrial Engineering and Educational Psychology. He has held an inherently multi-disciplinary position at RAYTHEON for many years and served in the US Army prior to that. His career has encompassed widespread experience in Military Operations Research, including a stint in Combat Developments at Ft. Benning. His professional standards of research and practice are high. He is an experienced manager and leader, and teaches in this area at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. It has been my great good fortune to work with J.P. on numerous projects, several of which have been published. J.P. will be a good President of MAS and will have my complete support.
My term runs through the business meeting at 3MAS when leadership of the Society will transfer to J.P. I shall then assume the duties of Past President, so I shall have the opportunity to continue to serve MAS. Your support made my term both rewarding and fulfilling. Without the unremitting support of the past and present Officers, members of Council, General and Track Chairs, Session Chairs, Presenters and the General Membership, what little success I have had would have been impossible. Please accept my thanks and blessing.
On behalf of the Society, I should also like to extend to the family, friends and coworkers of Robert Farrell our deepest condolences on his untimely passing. The Society and the Profession are both diminished by the vacuum of his departure. We offer the presentation of a posthumous President’s Award accepted by Dr Seth Bonder (Vector Research) as a small, belated token of the esteem and admiration that we held for him.
Finally, the last book that I shall recommend to you is Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam (Simon and Schuster). This work details the changes in social interaction in America, and provides some of the basis of our strategy for the Society in the future.