PROGRESS THROUGH PARTICIPATION

IF, AMONG OTHER THINGS, you’ve: 1) carved out not one but two successful careers as an engineer – one in industry, the other in academia – as a woman in a domain traditionally dominated by men; 2) raised a family; 3) spent a sabbatical year in post-apartheid South Africa helping build a university engineering program from the ground up; and 4) traveled the world several times over, hiked in the Swiss Alps and practiced Tai Chi on top of the Great Wall of China – what do you do next?

If you’re Susan Albin, you run for president of INFORMS, get elected and make it a goal of your presidency to reverse the decade-long decline in INFORMS membership while simultaneously getting more of the members more involved at all levels of the Institute. Just to make things more interesting, you attempt to do all of this at a time when membership and participation in such organizations throughout society – from international professional associations to local bowling leagues (as famously crystallized by Robert D. Putnam in “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”) – has reached its nadir.

Albin, a professor and graduate director with the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rutgers University, obviously relishes a worthwhile challenge. With that in mind, we sat down with Albin at the INFORMS Fall Conference in San Diego and later followed up with her by phone for the following interview. The topics of conversation ranged from the expected (her take on a host of INFORMS activities such as meetings, publications and subdivisions) to the unexpected (Tai Chi!) and just about everything in between, including the recent wave of women elected to the INFORMS presidency, the changing demographics of INFORMS and Albin’s research interests.

Albin, who served as secretary of INFORMS from 1996-97 and again from 2004-2007 and spent the last year as president-elect, officially takes the presidential reins on Jan. 1, 2010. Given that her stated goal for her presidency is building membership and participation in INFORMS, it seemed logical to start the questioning around that topic.

In order to stay an INFORMS member, you need to hook up with people with common goals and interests.

What triggered your presidential focus on growing membership, along with membership retention and participation?

INFORMS has approximately 10,000 members. When I joined INFORMS in the late 1970s, it had 15,000 members. Now that was a long time ago, but still, it’s a concern that the membership has diminished over time and continues to decline.

Why is INFORMS losing members?

In order to stay an INFORMS member, you need to hook up in some way to some group of people where you have common goals and common interests. If you just come to a meeting cold and you don’t know anyone and you’re not part of anything, it would be very overwhelming. But once you join a subdivision, then you have a set of contacts, you have people that you recognize, and if you come a few years in a row and you go to the subdivision track, then it’s much better. Data holds that that’s true, that people who are members of subdivisions are much more likely to join and remain an INFORMS member.

Similarly, if you give a talk as opposed to just attending a session, it’s a more active membership. And if you organize a session, that’s more active than giving a talk. If you’re the program chair for a subdivision or a whole meeting, that’s even more active. So that’s another track toward more involvement. You could meet someone, become involved in a prize entry and eventually get on a prize committee. That’s another track.

There are many, many paths where you can keep increasing your participation, but it’s clear that to stay a member it really helps if you are active. Otherwise, your membership might depend on whether or not you’re going to the meeting that year, and the degree of your enjoyment of a meeting and how much satisfaction you get out of it is a function of how involved you are. It would be great if we could facilitate this involvement in terms of retaining members and for attracting new members.

How do you reach out to the first-time attendee who doesn’t know anyone?

I think it is absolutely essential that people join a subdivision, so we need to support subdivisions and make sure they are active along with encouraging the first-time attendees any way we can to join a subdivision. I have some ideas how to do that; the top-down ideas have to do more with moving people along their track in terms of their involvement. For example, let’s say we’ve organized an international meeting for the Marketing Subdivision or some other group. There needs to be a way to say,“That was a successful meeting. We need to get this person on the Meetings Committee or nominate him or her to be VP of Meetings.” From the top-down, there needs to be a conscious effort to make sure there are people under 30 – not just your own students – on whatever committee you’re chairing, so the committee can have fresh blood and reap the benefits of the next generation’s involvement while the young people can reap the benefits of your experience.

Was that the start of your path to the presidency?

I joined INFORMS when Bell Labs was a major force in INFORMS. Twenty or 30 people from Bell Labs went to the meetings; we were very visible. It was like being in the ocean; I just stood there and was swept into INFORMS by my colleagues. I had colleagues all around me, so I knew which subdivision to join based on my research interest at the time – Applied Probability. I was encouraged to participate and the more I did, the richer was my experience at meetings.

At the early ORSA and TIMS meetings in the 1950s and 1960s, virtually all of the attendees were middle-aged white males. You look around at this INFORMS conference and you can’t help but notice the vast number of young people, many of them Asian and female. The demographics have clearly changed.

I very much like the new face of INFORMS. People from all backgrounds and from over the world are working together. This is clearly wonderful for all of us.

Is the declining membership a concern to you?

It’s been a challenge for a long time to make the organization larger and to retain members. When members leave us, they’re usually not gone forever. There’s a lot of churn. Each year many people who are not members the year before join us and each year people who were members leave us. The customer base remains largely intact. My point of view is that they leave because they are not involved in anything in particular. The main focus is putting in place a means to institutionalize ways to retain old members and attract new members. I think that’s extremely important.

Three of the past four presidents of INFORMS have been women, and the recent election of Rina Schneur will make it four out of five. What does that say to you?

It says to me there are a lot of great women who do a tremendous job for INFORMS. These women are just extraordinary. I think INFORMS is very lucky to have them.

You were a founding member of the “Women in OR/MS” Forum. What issues drove that and what issues remain?

It’s been so successful, it’s amazing. Each generation becomes more and more active. It’s a tremendous support group, and I go to at least one of their track sessions every INFORMS meeting. This year, it was,“What do I wish I knew when I finished my Ph.D.?”It covered three generations: [U.C. Berkeley professor] Candi Yano and two of her Ph.D. students, one of whom was much further along than the other.

The same issues that were only of interest to women are now of interest to almost as many men as women.

There were many major issues that led to the founding of WORMS. We wanted to see what we could do to work on particular issues, like pay equity and maternity leave, for example.

Interestingly and wonderfully, the same issues that were only seemingly of interest to women at that time are now of interest to almost as many men as women. Maybe there were some men out there who were interested all along, but they weren’t joining us. Now they are – we see men and women attending and presenting at the WORMS sessions.

What does the future hold for INFORMS journals – a major source of revenue, an area under pressure to evolve in terms of delivery format and an area you’re deeply involved with?

Our journals are an extraordinary strength by all hard evidence in terms of citations indices and the opinion of top universities and business schools. They are also a strength economically; they bring INFORMS tremendous revenue.

Our strategy in the past, and I’m sure it will continue well into the future, is to focus on quality. However, our last new journal was introduced a decade ago, and that is pretty much how we have been doing it – a journal a decade.

Things are changing dramatically in the publishing world. Just look at what’s happening with newspapers and magazines. There is a tremendous upheaval in the publishing world.

Traditional newspapers and magazines are folding right and left.

That’s right. People want their news online and they want it free. There is a total reorganization of the economic model. INFORMS is a teensy-weensy player even in the scholarly publication niche, let alone all publications, but we can’t avoid this upheaval. We’re not going to set the industry standards for scientific publishing, but we are going to have to be ready to move in whatever direction the economic model morphs into. That is a very big responsibility.

There are several driving forces I have to mention. One is called open access, which means that scientific articles are available to all. Congress has passed a law that research funded by NIH [National Institute of Health] must become open access after a relatively short grace period. If taxpayers are going to support the research, then the taxpayers have to have access to the results. The MIT faculty has voted to make all their journal publications open access. This gives you a sense of where things are going.

Let me throw a possible publishing financial model out there. Right now scholarly publications are supported by research libraries. So let’s just say that everything is open access, and instead of the money going through the university library, authors or their schools or their funding agencies had to pay $1,000 to $2,000 to publish in certain journals. The idea is instead of the university library paying all that money for subscriptions, now they would be giving that money to authors at their university to publish. A school that publishes a lot like MIT or Stanford would wind up paying more, and a school that publishes very little, say a small liberal arts college, would pay less, and so in some ways that would be a more progressive “publishing tax.” I don’t know what economic models will ultimately materialize, but that’s one idea.

Wouldn’t INFORMS lose revenue under such a model?

The revenue’s not going to go away; it’s just going to take another route. I think the hunger for information, the desire for knowledge, and the desire to communicate research is only increasing. I think it’s going to change into something else, and the change is going to be much more wide sweeping and dramatic than going from print journals to online, where the online version is basically the same as the print one, only on a screen.

No matter how the knowledge is ultimately packaged and distributed, you’re confident the journal revenue will not go away?

I’m concerned that during the transition we don’t lose our shirts. The current state of publishing, all of it, is going to change. I don’t know what that change will look like, what the new model will be, but during the transition we have to be ready to move. There will be many factors in the process that are not going to be within our control, so we have to operate very wisely in regards to those factors we can control.

Let’s talk about meetings. The general meeting in the fall, with something like 75 tracks and 4,000 attendees, has almost grown too big, while the spring practice meeting has not quite met attendance goals. Your thoughts?

In terms of the fall meeting, I think it’s good to put this in the context of evolution and continuous improvement. It’s always been a part of our culture that everyone who wants to can communicate their work at the fall meeting. We may be reaching a threshold. The number of sites in the U.S. where we can meet is diminishing because the requirement of having so many parallel sessions. The meetings department of INFORMS has done an extraordinary job. Every meeting is wonderful, and in some ways new and better than the one before. I’m confident that we will find some way to make it possible for everyone to communicate their work and at the same time make the conference more manageable.

At some point do you turn people down who want to present? Is that an option?

No. It’s in our bylaws. I don’t see that as an immediate option, but there could be other formats that might require less physical space. There were poster sessions in San Diego, and some of the conversations that got started around those posters were very intense and interesting and productive. That may be one among several formats we consider. But no, I don’t see any change in our Constitution that says every member gets to tell about their work.

The relatively new regional meetings have been quite successful. Can you talk about the needs they are filling?

I think people really thirst for the opportunity to get together. A lot of things can be done very effectively online, but for discussion and debate and absorbing huge amounts of material in a short amount of time, you really need face-to-face meetings or meetings of some format. It could be an online meeting, too, that I imagine will evolve in the not -so -distant future. People like to get together as a group to talk about operations research, so the regional meetings have been extremely successful. It’s a great place for students and practitioners and academics to present and to learn about what’s going on and to minimize some of the travel costs.

The spring practice meetings were originally designed as listener rather than presenter conferences. They were also designed to attract upper management folks and possibly C-level folks. For the most part, they haven’t done the latter.

They’ve been successful in terms of the satisfaction of attendees. I think a goal would be to attract a wider audience, although many people who are enthusiastic about the conference really appreciate its current size. That is part of its attraction. It’s really a community of people with similar world views about operations research and practice, similar responsibilities on their jobs and similar job incentives. It’s been successful and it, too, over time will evolve.

Switching gears and given the widespread economic downturn, how would you describe the financial health of INFORMS?

Our financial health is very good. We have taken a very diversified and conservative approach. There are two aspects to consider: endowment and the budget. In this environment, our endowment took a hit, but because it was diversified, I think we did relatively well. On the budget side, I would say thanks to wise management by the staff, the executive director and our treasurer, we’ve reduced costs and improved the financial management by streamlining the information technology that monitors the finances and reports on it. So we’re doing fine. Two areas that really deserve applause are the management of the endowment and cost cutting.

Two areas that really deserve applause are the management of the endowment and cost cutting.

As president-elect you addressed the INFORMS Roundtable at this meeting. What was your message?

I met with them twice. It was an extremely positive experience. The Roundtable is filled with incredibly smart, vocal people with good ideas. I found both of these talks to be a great experience. In the first talk, I told them about the revolution in scholarly publications and how it relates to INFORMS and heard their responses to it. In the second one, we talked about what kind of publications practitioners would like to see. One followed from the other. In both cases it was time extremely well spent. I think the Roundtable is a tremendous asset for INFORMS.

With its collective wealth of experience in industry, what can or should the Roundtable bring to the table that could help INFORMS?

The Roundtable is a great source of leadership for INFORMS. For example, right now, two of a dozen board members are former Roundtable members. Just the fact that the people in the Roundtable are business leaders, along with their identity, experience and capabilities as leaders, has benefited INFORMS. I’m sure that there are more programs and things that we can do, but I think the relationship is doing quite well.

As someone who started out as a practitioner before moving to academia, what’s your take on the age-old academia vs. practitioners conflict we so often hear within INFORMS and the O.R. community?

I worked as an engineer for about seven years and then I went into academia. It’s a very artificial barrier. I don’t know who invented this, but there is no line between the two. I think there is a line between people whose major income comes from an academic job and those whose income comes from a corporation because their incentives are different. Most operations researchers – academics and practitioners – derive their work from real problems. Operations research is not physics. It is not a basic science. It is an applied mathematical subject. Applied math means you have mathematical models, but it’s a model of something real. This is a very artificial separation that I don’t subscribe to. Starting with the founders of operations research, we’ve had excellent work from academics and practitioners alike on real problems. We’re all on the same side here.

So tell us a little about your research.

My area of research is quality engineering and in particular, multivariate process control. Sensors collect data on hundreds or even thousands of variables in continuous time, and my job is to use that data to improve processes and the resulting products and services. Data mining has become an invaluable tool in this goal along with statistical and physical modeling.

While my research is largely focused on advanced manufacturing processes, my students have used their knowledge in widely differing areas. One student for example is connecting brain processes to muscle movement in the lower limbs. Another is working on detecting large-scale fraud, such as counterfeiting, in credit card transactions.

I want to emphasize that I am delighted that INFORMS serves as a large umbrella and that researchers in my field have a home here. The Quality, Statistics and Reliability section is an extremely lively and active group with a very large number of sessions, panels and discussions at every meeting. We started about a decade ago.

What does INFORMS do really well and what are its weaknesses?

Right before we met, I got an e-mail from a colleague in Brazil who had just come to his first INFORMS meeting. He’s in my area of quality and reliability, but he has a wide area of operations research and industrial engineering interests where he works. He was just raving about the meeting. Our meetings are stellar and our publications are stellar.

What is the purpose of INFORMS or any professional society? To provide a place for the exchange of ideas about our work, about our field and where it’s going. It’s a forum for the exchange of ideas whether it’s written or on a Web site or in person at a conference. Conferences and publications are our primary activities, and, along with subdivisions, are the primary reasons INFORMS exists. We do a great job with all of them.

I think the area where we need to improve is in attracting more members. We need to figure out how to attract and serve a membership that’s two or three times the size we have now.

You can envision upward of 30,000 members?

The people are already out there doing operations research, but they are not a part of INFORMS – people who are working for the government, people who are working for all kinds of industries. We have a very good record of serving and attracting academic members, but there are a large number of people who could be a part of INFORMS who aren’t. That’s a long-term goal, but yes, the people are out there.

What are the big ideas the INFORMS Board is working on that the membership should be excited about?

Some years ago a strategic planning process was put in place. Not to exclude other things, but the two areas of focus are serving practitioners and publications. I’m chairing the strategic planning on publications and Don Kleinmuntz is chairing the strategic planning on practice. In the publications area we are going to make a very strong effort to attract proposals from groups or individuals about new journals. We haven’t started a new journal in a decade. We would like to increase our portfolio, so that’s one area where there’s going to be a lot of activity.

What do you do for fun when you’re not working?

I have a husband and two children, so I like to spend as much time as I can with them. But I have two hobbies: hiking and, for the last 13 years, Tai Chi. I’m very connected to my Tai Chi school. Last summer I was in China for a conference and visits to several universities. During this visit when I had a chance to visit the Great Wall. I did Tai Chi on the Great Wall. It was really a great experience.

I was astounded at the incredible power of any little gesture I’d make or word I’d say.

Why Tai Chi?

It makes you physically strong because you are in constant motion for an hour or an hour and a half at a time. Your center of gravity is quite low when you do it, so you have to develop lots of muscles, especially in your legs and your core. It increases your physical strength, but it also requires total concentration and engages your mind in a way that puts things in perspective.

You’ve said that one of the things that motivates you each day is teaching and working with your students. Professionally, do you consider yourself first and foremost a teacher?

On the tax form where it asks my occupation, I put down “professor.” In other contexts, I will often describe myself as an “engineer.” “Teacher” fits very well, too. I don’t have to choose. I don’t have to say first and foremost. I can just say I like them all.

Teaching means a lot to me. Teachers have an extraordinary ability to change people’s lives by the knowledge they impart and through their relationships with their students. When I first arrived at Rutgers, I was astounded at the incredible power of any little gesture I’d make or word I’d say. Whenever I’m asked why I became so involved in math and science, I always say that when I was in 7th grade, my teacher, Mr. Jackson, told me, “I think you’re pretty good at math.” That’s what got the ball rolling. That’s all it took.

It really is amazing the amount of power teachers have, so you have to be aware that what you say and what you do and how you act can change peoples’ lives.

A year from now, what would need to happen in order for you to call your term as president of INFORMS a success?

I would like to see increased participation at every level of INFORMS: People who are now attending meetings are giving talks, people who are now giving talks are organizing sessions, people who are now organizing sessions are on a meeting program committee, people who never imagined they would be leaders of INFORMS are stepping up and doing just that. I would also like to see more members joining INFORMS, so we’re increasing participation at both ends of the spectrum. The primary thing we can offer people is an opportunity to participate, whether it’s meetings, journals, prizes or leadership positions. You can remove any other part of INFORMS and it would still be INFORMS, but you can’t remove participation. Participation is our foundation.