I am honored and pleased to be nominated for the office of president-elect of INFORMS. The next few years are critical to the development and positioning of INFORMS as a premiere professional society. For any profession to exist, it must be practiced, and for operations research this means the delivery, implementation and use of practical systems and solutions to meet the needs of business and industry. A healthy OR practice creates demand: demand for new jobs and places for our graduates to work, demand for new techniques and methods, and thus, a need for our research and theory.

For our profession to continue to grow and remain healthy, a balanced but very dynamic and interactive relationship between our practice and academic communities must be maintained. A number of traditional challenges face us. We have subdivisions and chapters with their own programs and needs. There is a large and important set of journals and publications to be nurtured. This is a particularly critical time for our publications; there is a new journal starting up next year, and there are very important issues about how we price and sell our publications to be dealt with.

INFORMS has an ambitious schedule of meetings that are regional, national and international in scope. The INFORMS annual meeting is tremendous, but needs continued development, and the new spring meeting, which turned a profit this year, still requires careful development so that it can provide value, be used to help attract new members to INFORMS, and convince previous members to join INFORMS again. We have a sound financial structure, but it's being stretched to the limit. It requires constant attention to make sure it is being utilized effectively to meet the needs of INFORMS. All of these franchises require attention and prioritization to effectively allocate our resources.

A major initiative being coordinated by our current president and the INFORMS Board is the development and implementation of a marketing strategy for our profession. This is a multifaceted activity involving many people and initiatives, some of which will take several years to realize. These actions will require screening, prioritizing and support for their development, implementation and success. If elected I will work to help ensure the implementation and effectiveness of our new marketing strategy.

A diffusion process is occurring across our profession. Our success has fostered specialization, replacing centralized OR groups with groups like Marketing Science, Scheduling and Logistics. An OR manager is now an inventory manager or something else. Many of these groups have their own professional societies and publications. INFORMS must continue to provide value to these specialized areas to guide many of our OR graduates as they make career choices and to retain their loyalty to the OR profession and INFORMS. Such programs and initiatives are critical to the future of INFORMS. INFORMS must remain a dynamic mix of practice and academics!

INFORMS should be the caretaker of our profession and a hub for networking among the specialty groups that have grown from our profession. INFORMS is fortunate in having a large number of people devoted to making our profession great. Having been a full-time practitioner and a full-time academic during my career, I think I understand the needs of these constituencies. I believe this will help me to bring a perspective on the synergies and effort that are required for INFORMS to create and deliver innovative programs and services to our extremely diverse profession.

My activities as vice president-Practice, with CPMS, the Roundtable and the Franz Edelman Prize competition have given me experience that will be useful as we increase the role of INFORMS in the academic and practice communities. Electronic services will play a major roll in our publications strategy, and because of diffusion and diversity, an important factor in our ability to implement and disseminate programs for the dispersed practitioners who are becoming a greater part of our diverse profession.

There are many people in INFORMS who are bringing their time and energy to deal with many of the challenges we have discussed. My role will be to support these initiatives. I will work with the Board in setting priorities, selecting programs and ensuring the financial viability of INFORMS.

My focus as president will be to:

• Facilitate and support the implementation of programs to bring value to our profession.
• Ensure the broadest view of operations research while embracing the new emerging technologies.
• Facilitate continued development of our electronic infrastructure, and software to support our publications, new services and create connectivity for our dispersed membership.
• Create new opportunities for interactions between academic, business and industrial communities. Our new spring meeting can play a key rolehere.
• Promote more participation by practitioners in both our meetings and publications.
• Create opportunities for more teaming between the academic and practice communities.
• Target industry magazines for the publication of non-technical articles on implemented OR solutions to problems facing their industry.

I believe that the operations research profession has many exciting challenges before it, and with your support, I would appreciate the chance to serve INFORMS in helping our profession meet these challenges.

Spencer was elected to Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi.





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