Each year the IEEE Computer Society provides an opportunity for the candidates for IEEE president elect to respond to questions of interest to Computer Society members. Your answers will be published in the September issue of Computer. Please provide a response to each of the five questions below. Your response to each question should not exceed 150 words.

1) IEEE leadership has recently made statements regarding the importance of welcoming individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines into the organization. In the Computer Society, this has been our strategy for several decades. The membership report at the recent IEEE Board of Directors meeting and the proposed follow-up project focused on electrical engineers and other traditional engineers. Even helping mechanical engineers was mentioned. However, in the entire presentation, computing fields were never mentioned. What do you believe is the appropriate role of fields like software engineering, information technology and bioinformatics in the IEEE and how would you as president see that that role is achieved?

Response:
Computing and related fields are one of the key integrating elements across the IEEE. This includes hardware and software engineering, information technology, distributed and grid-based systems, high-performance computing, human-computer interaction, bioinformatics, quantum computing, molecular computing, and much more. I support the identification and representation of the broad integrating elements of IEEE disciplines, with computing as one such key area. These integrating elements must have in place appropriate organizations, programs, products and services, and be broadly visible in the IEEE and throughout the world. My call for a lower membership fee with a choice of services will help the IEEE compete with the ACM and other organizations that focus on the computing professional. I favor a broad inclusive definition of a computing professional and the admission of this broad group to the IEEE.

2) Peter Drucker identifies "responsibility" and "accomplishment" as the keys to motivating volunteers. Robert Putnam indicates that social capital - a key benefit of collaborative work, is based on "trust" and "reciprocity." These in turn encourage participation and open the doors for new initiatives. What specific steps can the IEEE take to increase these essential aspects of the organization?

Response:
We must acknowledge accomplishments of our long-term volunteers with a new category of membership, the Distinguished Member, which would be based on significant and continuing contributions to the IEEE. Next, we need to develop a clear set of activities, responsibilities, and resources that are available for volunteers in different parts of the organization. Today, society intellectual property, which is sold in our packaged products, accounts for 50 percent of IEEE revenue. However, societies have no real mechanism to use these financial resources to innovate. This must change. Our biggest impediment is letting an ultimate goal of providing scalable products and services get in the way of innovative experiments. We must be willing to spend money empowering trusted volunteers to experiment and then provide resources to capitalize on successful experiments. Most importantly, we must be willing to invest in challenging nonstandard experiments without guarantees of success.

3) Funds, especially funds for new projects, have been extremely difficult for societies including the Computer Society to find. The "New Initiatives" program has been implemented to address this problem for the entire Institute. Given that there has now been some time to reflect on the New Initiatives program, do you feel that it has been successful? In the spirit of continuous improvement, how can the program be improved? How would you work to see that appropriate organizational units including the Computer Society have better access to their reserves for the implementation of new projects?

Response:
The initial activities of the New Initiatives Committee (NIC) were a success, but we need to restructure the committee to meet new goals. Our organizational customers and members, voting with their dollars, are interested in aggregated IP products. Thus, scalability, integration, and coordination of projects ultimately become important. Societies should be able to access some portion of their reserves for innovation. We have a responsibility to follow the progress of innovative projects and decide when to expand them institute-wide. This should be a task of the TAB Products committee and the NIC. Furthermore, there will always be critical projects that cut across society and organizational interests and are beyond any individual group. These need to be appropriately vetted and ultimately approved by the Board of Directors. The NIC’s current charter adds unnecessary layers of bureaucracy to experimentation without providing effective mechanisms for large investments.

4) There are two significant issues with the current corporate allocations to TAB and the societies and councils. First, they are too large; the total allocation increased by 16% between the 2004 projected budget and the first pass of the 2005 budget. Second, when reductions in the infrastructure allocations take place, they occur after the society and council budgets are set, often after the fiscal year is over, preventing the societies and councils from using the surplus. How would you control, perhaps cap, spending at the IEEE level to insure that the units could indeed do responsible budgeting?

Response:
We must have a multi-year budget. This would provide revenue and expense targets, address the effects of initiatives and infrastructure costs, and allow for effective budget development. The challenge the societies have faced over the past several years is that the initial infrastructure allocations have been unrealistically high. This puts unnecessary pressure on the societies, creating a budgeting nightmare, and leads to misunderstanding and distrust. By now, we should understand the nature of our infrastructure, its growth, and key variables. We must provide for inflationary,infrastructure growth and keep that as a cap. Any other increases, which can occur each year, would be associated with projects, initiatives, and so on. These costs must be accounted for separately, and we must see the ongoing impact of our initiatives – in terms of both cost and ROI. Finally, we must present infrastructure costs in a clear, understandable format to eliminate confusion and mistrust.

5) Has the current structure of the IEEE, especially the IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB), outlived its useful life? Specifically, does it make sense to follow a United Nations model (one society, one vote), or are the problems that exist for large organizations significantly different from those of smaller organizations? Should we separate TAB into a large society body and a small society body? Should we encourage some form of independence of larger subunits? Explain specifically changes you feel are required and how you as president would encourage TAB and the IEEE to reorganize.

Response:
TAB has several functions: bringing societies together to understand common needs, opportunities, and IEEE activities (currently done poorly); working together on the activities, products, and services that involve all societies and providing a voice for all societies in these matters (done reasonably well); looking after the well-being of the IEEE’s technical activities. Here, TAB does not do a good job as evidenced by the challenges the largest societies (including the Computer Society) face because of the various allocation formulas.

I do not support splitting IEEE into either independent units or big society/small society bodies. We must find a way to have effective representation of the difference in scale and scope of our societies. One possibility is a Society/Council group and a Division Director group, with approval required by both and a resolution process defined for disagreements. This critical challenge is currently being explored in detail within TAB.