How well do we do that ourselves, as professionals in INFORMS? Well, there is certainly room for improvement. At INFORMS we must practice what we preach! As Step No. 1 in this effort to bring O.R. thinking to the routine but important operations of INFORMS, we currently have up on the INFORMS Web site a customer survey. If you have not yet completed our survey, please do! Simply go to the INFORMS home page, www.informs.org/, and click on the button on the top right that says, "Share your views on O.R. and get a chance to win a free iPod."

The purpose of the survey is to discover what new products and services INFORMS members and perspective INFORMS members would like of their professional society. We are particularly interested in hearing from those with master's degrees in O.R. and related fields and who are not now INFORMS members. Our educational institutions graduate more master's students than doctoral students, yet about three-quarters of INFORMS members have Ph.D.s. Where do all the master's graduates go? Why are they not members of INFORMS? We want to know. And we want to learn how we may be able to correct that, to make INFORMS more attractive to practicing professionals, if we were to add new products and services.

One example would be life-long learning modules, available either online or "live" at INFORMS conferences. These modules may carry certification of some kind. We want to learn if such modules would be attractive to current and/or prospective INFORMS members. So, please go and take the survey, and tell your friends and colleagues about it! Thanks!

What about our own "systems performance" to our members? Well, many of our members are authors. For them, an important activity is the submission of journal articles to the refereeing process and eventual publication. What they publish is important to many, including those outside of INFORMS. What is one of the key performance measures of the publication process? It is time from first submission until publication. This time is usually the sum of the times associated with one or more review cycles, revision cycles and then either time in queue, accepted for publication or rejection. We have the sum of process delays and queueing delays.

To practice what we preach, we should publish and display these performance numbers for each of our journals. We have found journals in the humanities that have been doing this for years. But INFORMS, where queueing theory is a pillar of O.R., has not been so transparent in displaying our performance to our customers — our authors and readers. This is about to change.

The INFORMS Board has been working with the leadership in our journal publication process, and starting later this year we will publish and display queueing statistics for several of our journals. This will grow over time until one or at most two years from now, such statistics will appear on the Web for all to see, for each of our journals.

The display may resemble that shown in the figure below (courtesy Mark Daskin). If we are not performing well, that will be very apparent by simple observation of the displayed data. Prospective authors will choose to submit elsewhere, especially if the research results are time-sensitive and/or if the author has a major career step in the near term, such as tenure review. But such pressure on our editors and referees should result in speedier reviews and convergence to the decision to publish or reject much more quickly. For those editors in chief who inherited a long queue of accepted papers, such a visible process would provide them with ammunition necessary to go the INFORMS Board and ask for a one-time page count increase to reduce the queue. This is one example of where your INFORMS Board is implementing practice-what-we-preach steps that are similar to those we might offer as consultants to other organizations.

Other ideas the Board is considering:

• using O.R. algorithms to schedule fall meetings;
  
  
• graph theory analysis of use of the INFORMS Web site to make it more user-friendly;
  
  
• creation of "my.informs.org," where each member can log in and access all their INFORMS-related services in one place: dues and membership status, membership directory, conference registration, abstract submission, journal subscriptions and relevant subdivision sites. Essentially, this would be a highly personalized and customized version of INFORMS On-Line, which contains only those links and information that are relevant to that member.

Your suggestions are welcomed! We want your feedback.

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