CHAIRMAN’S MESSAGE

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Greetings from my basement home office in Bel Air, Maryland. At the ITEA board of directors’ meeting on 4 November, forerunner to the Annual Symposium, I was elected to a two-year term as the next Chairman. I am flattered and honored and one of my first duties is to write this column. I looked over previous December messages and they are almost form letters – talk about duties as the new Chair, talk about the recent Symposium, talk about departing and newly elected board members, talk about other ITEA events. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of all those, but I decided to be different, a little.

We did elect our Board Executive Committee – Chairman (me), Vice Chairman (Erwin Sabile), Treasurer (John Rafferty), and Secretary (Cathy O’Carroll). The rest of the Board consists of eleven elected members and up to four additional appointed members. The various positions are staggered in time so that all are not vacated simultaneously. More details are available on our website: https://itea.org/about-itea/#board. Take a look.

We did hold a very successful and enjoyable Annual Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama hosted by the Rocket City Chapter of ITEA, where we presented Colonel Eileen Bjorkman, USAF, Retired, with our highest honor, the Dr. Allen R. Matthews Award. You can read about that and much more in the summary of the event in this issue of the ITEA Journal. Dr. Raymond D. O’Toole, Jr., Principal Deputy Director, Operational Test & Evaluation, presented our closing Keynote Address and amplified it for this issue. It may make you wonder why you weren’t there.

There are other ITEA events during the year, well attended and informative, with opportunities to learn, present, get involved in organizing, and network. The ITEA landing page has an EVENTS link at the top; explore, then join us.

Our immediate past Chairman, Mr. Mark Phillips, championed the ITEA Journal as a well-recognized icon of the Association, and as a powerful vehicle for engaging younger scientists and engineers, promoting your career, gaining recognition for your achievements, and staying current on technology developments. I heartily agree with Mark’s assessment and encourage you to become involved with the Journal. Write an article, volunteer to be a reviewer, mentor a younger professional and help them get published, or suggest a theme for a future issue.

Speaking of young people, we need them but ITEA doesn’t have them, not in numbers that will sustain the Association when those of us in the silver tsunami are swept away. So, I ask, what attracted you to participate in a technical society early in your career? I worked in the aerospace industry and many of my colleagues were members of the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics), so I joined. We published our work in AIAA conferences and journals, served on technical committees, organized and chaired technical sessions and entire events, and rose through the professional ranks from member to Associate Fellow or Fellow. Everything we did aided our career and professional network. How can we translate that experience to today? How do we make ITEA more attractive to younger scientists and engineers, independent of their employer? My younger employees yearn for venues that provide technology reviews, demonstrations, and assessments and overviews of related capabilities. ITEA hosts webinars, workshops, and symposia, but what about a persistent technology focus in the form of a technology committee? We have committees for membership, publications, ways and means, corporate development, etc. but do these attract early career professionals? Maybe the publications committee, though many younger people don’t feel qualified to review journal articles. What if we had a technology committee for communicating to membership about emerging technology and new developments? We have amazing technical expertise in ITEA. Can we structure a committee in a way that attracts senior, mid-career, and junior scientists to co-mingle, raise issues, share information, and reach beyond ITEA for insights? Can we resurrect the technology committee but change its direction from planning Technology Reviews (those were great and need to return) to bringing people together at the working level?  Let me know if you’d like to be part of this initiative!

ITEA will be 45 years old in 2025 and will celebrate all year, culminating in November at our Annual Symposium in Destin, Florida. See the ITEA website for special events and announcements throughout the year. We’re planning our first non- U.S. workshop in May of  2025, organized and hosted by the Western Europe Chapter (United Kingdom) with the theme of Delivering T&E to Support the Pace of Technology Change. The workshop also addresses a shortcoming of ITEA. We call ourselves the International Test and Evaluation Association but the “I” in ITEA is often perceived as lower case by our members due to lack of international involvement. (No, Alabama is NOT a foreign country.) ITEA leadership has evolved to include Directors from the UK and Australia; the Journal editor-in-chief and the chair of the Professional Development Committee are from Australia; and the Secretary of our Executive Committee is from the UK. In 2026 we’re planning with two Australian professional societies to cohost a meeting there. Our recent Symposium had a large contingent from the Republic of Korea, the UK, and Australia and several individuals from Brazil, Austria, and Sweden. This is good progress; let’s keep growing membership here and abroad.  

Enough for now, this is more than I planned to write – it will keep happening. But by the time you read it each quarter, it will fit on one page (starting next quarter). Go read our Journal, it’s exclusively online now (https://itea.org/journals/), plan to attend an event, get involved with a committee, and send us ideas on how we can make ITEA better fit your needs.

J. Michael Barton, Ph.D.

Parsons Fellow