By Jose Rivera
I hope you had a nice summer (for those in the Northern hemisphere). By the time this newsletter is sent, the CSIA Board will have met in-person in Chicago October 3-5. As is normally the case, we dedicate the Fall meeting to strategic planning for the association.
Some years we craft a new plan; in other years we review progress / update / fine tune. 2023 is a heavy year as we are developing a new strategic plan leveraging the foundation of the previous one. (Editor’s note: One output from this fall meeting was a revised mission, vision and values statement.)
July Board Meeting
The board met at the end of July. We appreciated the facilitation provided by Ralph Vasami, a seasoned executive from Kellen, CSIA’s association management company. Because the execution of several strategic projects involves resources (people, $) and because our budget gets approved in December, the Board asked for this meeting. I thank the Board members for taking time for this important meeting.
Since the July meeting I been working to generate a strategy that considers the input by:
- The Board from the facilitated July session.
- Our broad membership through our regular surveys (e.g., conference and year-end membership surveys), regular one-on-one interactions and other sources (CSIA EZ Stats, JPMorgan survey).
- Association management literature and input by our association management company on general trends impacting associations.
30th Anniversary on the Way!
CSIA will turn 30 next year. Over this period, we have seen considerable transformation from our humble beginnings.
Many of our members have seen this transformation at their companies too. For CSIA, this forces us to take a hard look at who we are and what we want to be to support the needs of members today and tomorrow.
I hope to share this work with you during our townhall business meeting in Dallas, TX during the 2024 conference.
An immediate output from the July in-person Board meeting was the approval of a Director for BP and Professional Development. We are glad to have Eric Schaefer on board to lead two key initiatives for CSIA. Please see this announcement.
At the time of this writing, I’m about to travel with Monica Saunder (CSIA staff) to inspect possible sites for our 2025 CSIA Conference. We hope to have a recommendation for the Board to approve this month.
As is our tradition, we won’t be sharing the selection until the end of the 2024 conference. What I can already share is that this is an awesome location and that it will check many of the boxes that our members told us are important to them on the survey we ran at the end of the 2023 conference.
For 2025 we are back to the “West” honoring our 2 East, 1 West pattern. The resurgence of events has increased the demand for hotels, forcing us to decide years in advance. We are already looking into 2026!
Jose Rivera is CEO of Control System Integrators Association.