November AMP_Digital

HIGHL IGHTS A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 9 7 2 FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK The following is an excerpt from ASM President Zi-Kui Liu’s speech at the ASM Annual Business Meeting in Port- land on September 29. Our 2016 strategic plan identified three critical areas in which ASM Inter- national must excel to ensure our suc- cess and growth: technical excellence, increased membership, and strategic partnerships/collaborations. ASM was fortunate to recruit Bill Mahoney in 2016 to lead the reali- zation of the strategic plan. Bill and his team developed a three-year Renewal program and have demonstrated signif- icant progress. As we are coming to the end of the three-year Renewal program and the third year of the 2016 strategic plan, we ponder “How is ASM doing?” and “What’s next?” At our annual strategic planningmeeting this past August, an exter- nal facilitator evaluated the progress during the last three years in comparison with the strategic plan. The facilitator concluded that “Overall, ASM’s operating efforts have met the goals and objectives in the 2016 Strategic Plan. Member- ship and revenue have been enhanced. The technical capa- bilities of ASM have improved markedly thereby starting to position ASM as a world leader for materials information. ASM has measurably expanded the number and quality of its strategic partnerships and collaborations, which will hopefully have a meaningful impact on ASM.” While our new strategic plan for the next five to 10 years is still being formulated, it is evident that the three areas remain critical to ASM. ASM has grown significantly in terms of its digital content and e-commerce capabilities. For example, all ASM legacy Handbooks, Failure Analysis guides, and Alloy Center databases are now in digital form and available via online subscription. The balance of ASM’s legacy content will cross the digital divide in 2020. New third-party digital capabilities, such as the NIST materials data curation platform, and the Materials Proper- ties for Data Science database, are also available. All of these legacy and new capabilities are discoverable, searchable, and accessible via the internet. This access is facilitated by a new e-commerce and membership management systems backbone, utilizing cloud-based applications such as Mem- ber Nation, Salesforce, and the Silverchair digital library, all of which were implemented between 2017 and 2018. Under Dave Furrer’s leadership, ASM has marched deeply into the field of ICME and is working on the development of a data ecosystem that integrates experimental and computational datasets with computational tools, enabling software as a service (SaaS) to all stakeholders. To grow interdisciplinarily, we need to extend both vertically and horizontally. Vertically, we will start a new task force on chapters and volunteerism with an enhanced new digital platform, to support chapters to build stronger interactions among individual and sustaining members and with universities and student organizations. Horizontally, we want to extend our services and collaborations to other professional societies and engineering disciplines. ASM has signed MOU’s with a number of professional societies including MRS and NACE, and has formed collaborative agreements with corporations such as IMS, Nikon, Parker Hannifin, and Lincoln Electric with many of them to be pres- ent at our IMAT2020 conference. ASM International is lagging behind in terms of global reach in comparison with other professional societies. For example, IEEE, MRS, and TMS all have half of their member- ships outside of the U.S., while ASM’s reach is shy of 20%. If we could achieve the same demographics as other societ- ies, we will have the potential to significantly enhance ASM’s impact through the global network of people and digital content. The most significant event in the last year was the acquisition of Granta by ANSYS. Our visionary leaders led by ASM President Ashok Khare approved the investment of $1.6M in Granta in 2000, a spinoff from Cambridge Univer- sity led by Prof. Mike Ashby, an ASM Distinguished Life Mem- ber. We received an amazing eight-figure return, of which $1M was donated to the ASM Materials Education Foun- dation, and paid off an eight-figure indebtedness, and still have eight figures left. Should we put the remainder into our regular investment portfolio like most professional soci- eties do? Or can we develop approaches to systemize the Granta-type of investment to differentiate ASM from other societies. This is an important question that ASM leadership is working to answer. Your suggestions and ideas are highly appreciated. Together, let us do better than our best to grow ASM digitally, interdisciplinarily, and globally with a solid diver- sity/equity/inclusion plan, and advance materials technol- ogies for humanity. ASM President Zi-Kui Liu, FASM zi-kui.liu@asminternational.org Liu FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK