Announcements Conferences Global Updates News September 2016 Uncategorized

The TEMS future conference program

Introduction

As a new Society, TEMS is developing its own conference series named TEMSCON.  A name simple, and directly associated to the acronym of our Society, that hopefully will become part of our speech as in “I am going to a TEMSCON this year”. The key goal is to offer a conference series whose themes connects technologies  and business topic. 

This addresses the challenges and solution strategies found in today’s community of innovation, entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship. TEMS will continue to collaborate and co-sponsor relevant other events such as ICE, ICDIM, and others but its main focus will be its unique conference program.

Concept

The concept is that we would have three conferences per year each with a slightly different focus.  These would be rolled out over the next three years.  Names may be altered over time, but we will keep the Spring, Summer and Fall model with the new TEMSCON logo under development.

ISMDE (TEMSCON Spring) – International Symposium on Management of Developing Environments – while still a TEMS general conference selected themes will encompass management challenges and methodologies encountered in developing countries and other developing environments.

TEMSCON (TEMSCON Summer) – International Conference on the Technology and Engineering Management Society – the flagship TEMS conference.    Focus the theme of “Enabling Product Success” – this theme is good to draw from the engineering community of the IEEE as well as business and managers. TEMSCON will endeavor to secure thought leaders in technology, engineering management, and innovation as keynote speakers and IEEE TEM Journal will have played a role in communicating the conference to its readership, authors, and editorial board. Complimentary top tier journals should be invited to participate in ‘Meet the Editor’ style workshops, further signaling to potential participants that TEMSCON is prestigious event.

E-TEMS (TEMSCON Fall) – Modeled after the Tech Industry Summit, a European sister was crafted, the European Technology and Engineering Management Summit (E-TEMS). Until we decide on a suitable name this is our European Fall event. A conceptual theme for this event is being developed and will align to our Focus areas.

E-TEMS 2016 will be held in Frankfurt and the 2017 edition is planned for in Munich.  TEMSCON 2017 will take place in Santa Clara, California while TEMSCON 2018 may be in Region 4.  ISMDE will start in South Africa in 2018.  We are discussing with others to fill the plan through 2019 by the end of this year.

This gives us a theme for each event.  ISMDE would allow for Regions around the world to engage (including Asia and Africa). TEMSCON Summer would be traditional.  We will develop a theme for E-TEMS that can continue.

How to..

Some pointers for folks considering to engage in a conference, there are many opportunities. The chair and co-chairs, supported by the program committee, own the responsibility to make the entire event happen. Collectively, the conference leadership (chair and co-chairs) and program committee will play a pivotal role in leveraging their networks (academic, industry, project consortiums, research groups, funding bodies, top journal editors, thought leaders, top keynote speakers, social media outlets etc.) to organically build a core conference community. There is a lot of opportunity for engagement as track chairs, session chairs, publication, marketing chairs, reviewers and of course authors and speakers.  Local chapters can help as well on all of these aspects. Theme:  Tie the theme of the event to connect a technology and business topic(s).   For example, you could have “Management Challenges of IoT” or “Management Solutions with 5G” or even “Managing Engineering in the Enterprise.” Of course, the chairing team selects the conference theme but attempt to keep this link between technology and business. This is because we wish to attract businesses, technical authors, and attendees.  So tracks and papers could span between traditional business topics and related engineering matters.   This is appropriate for the IEEE, which spans challenges and solution strategies found in today’s community of innovation, entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship. Note, these were just merely examples of subjects. Venue:  Pick a location where transportation and housing are reasonable, and consider that attendee are international.   Doing things on campus is often less expensive, which is frequently done in Europe, but can be a tremendous burden to attendees – unless the campus is centrally located in the host city.    In addition having one location can be used to attract some industry sponsors.  Being near a large city allows for drawing sponsors and being near a university draws students to help.   Organization: An organizing committee needs to be set up about 18 months prior to the conference taking place.  An AdCom member can help with establishing a chair.  Someone from the venue also needs to be a chair (or Region chair).  Critical volunteers include:

  • Chairs to organize and manage the event
  • Program Chairs to maintain the themes, assign and decide with the track chairs on the paper sessions
  • Track Chairs to manage the papers submitted to the track, review and selection recommendation.  Track Chairs work with the Program Chair to organize the event into sessions.
  • Paper Reviewers
  • Marketing Chair to get the message out across multiple channels
  • Publications Chair helps organize the proceedings and paper processing
  • Finally, Session Chairs lead sessions of speakers

TEMS introduced the concept of Technical Activity Committees (or TACs for short) to allow individuals to engage in TEMS programs.  This includes the roles of volunteers listed above as well as suggesting themes and engaging in events.  Contributing TAC members can apply for funding to engage in a conference, such as the one they help build.  We plan to align face-to-face TAC meetings with our conference program.   TEMS has worked with a paper processing company to enable paper processing for our conferences. We have selected EDAS for our Society. Using it multiple times also creates more knowledge and experience that can be carried over from one conference committee to another. This provides steps to build the conference and a large reviewer database and simplifies much of the operation overhead in making a conference.  It is not trivial to use (or required), but it can make the organization and processing easier. If you are interested in areas of TEMS you might wish to engage in a Technical Committee (see http://ieee-tems.org/node/1686).  Members of these committees will help to develop conference directions, organization, tracks, topics as well as publication directions.  Anyone can join.

Next

Typically you want to start working on the conference 24 months to 18 ahead of the planned date. It takes the time to choose a good time and formalize the venue.  The operational model should be to present the call for papers, website, and venue at the same conference the prior year.  So in TEMSCON 2017 this will be presented for TEMSCON 2018, and so on.  

This is also why we already start now to look for your engagement and support for all of these future events. We look forward to your comments, questions, suggestions but foremost your participation, to make TEMS and TEMSCON a great success.

Robert Bierwolf, VP Conferences

and all of ExCom and AdCom

About the author

Ravikiran Annaswamy

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