Celebrating, Then Moving Ahead

February 2005 finds ASME with much to celebrate and much to contemplate as an organization. Founders Day (Feb. 16) allows us to celebrate 125 years as a professional society focused on knowledge, community and advocacy. Engineers Week (Feb. 20-26) provides a unique opportunity to celebrate our role as a global leader in setting the standards of engineering excellence.

Even as we celebrate our historical achievements, we are making important, new progress. We are moving toward the culmination of our Continuity and Change (C&C) Initiative (www.asme.org/change) reorganization efforts. At its April meeting, the Board of Governors will review and finalize the enterprise-wide prioritized programs. These were identified in late January by leaders from the newly organized Sectors, and given enterprise-wide order by our Summit Team in February, providing the necessary alignment with ASME's strategic priorities.

Our key strategic priorities — to become more relevant to the early-career engineers; to stay relevant to industry, government and academia; to attract individuals with multidisciplinary skills; to allocate our resources more effectively; and to continue to become a more global organization — will better enable ASME to link our operations and resources to strategy.

Our work this month also addresses essential budgetary realignment. Fiscal year 2006 budget decisions by the Summit Team and the Committee on Finance and Investments will provide support for enterprise-wide program priorities and elimination of our historical use of projected investment earnings. The result will be a budget truly based on available resources and focused on how ASME can best execute our strategic priorities.

ASME is building global momentum in important ways. For example, through Engineers Without Borders, ASME members are becoming mentors and ASME students are building project teams and traveling to communities bringing appropriate and sustainable technology to improve the quality of life (www.asme.org/students/ewb.html). Plans are now under way to extend these projects into tsunami-related rebuilding efforts in Asia.

As we expand our horizons, as we celebrate the organization we love throughout this anniversary year, I again ask you to recommit yourselves to ASME and to our profession. ASME excels at setting the standards on many fronts, and working together, we will continue this successful legacy well into the future.

— Harry Armen
ASME President

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