52
Geotechnical News • March 2012
ASFE NEWS
THE
GEOPROFESSIONAL
BUSINESS
ASSOCIATION
President’s Six-Month Report
ASFE is moving forward with its purpose, to maximize the geopro-
fessions’ importance and value to the marketplace. The aim of this
purpose is to counter the marginalization and commoditization that
threaten the welfare of our professions. In the past three years we
have established this bold purpose, aligned our committees and
structures with the purpose, and are ramping up our activities and
programs toward achieving our vision. We are very encouraged by
the enthusiastic response to our purpose from Member Firms and
beyond.
We put in place a 2009-2012 Strate-
gic Plan (http://www.asfe.org/index.
cfm?pid=10588)and, almost impos-
sibly, we have accomplished every-
thing the plan called for. This included
expansion of staff to include an
Organizational Relations Director and
Membership Director, both positions
now being filled by Colleen Knight.
To fund that expansion, we estab-
lished our Foundation for the Future
campaign
.
cfm?cdid=12601&pid=10344), asking
concerned firms to pay four years’
worth of dues over a three-year period.
The economy notwithstanding, we’re
getting that done, too.
A critical and bold accomplishment
called for in our Strategic Plan is to
collect and coordinate alliance organi-
zations, because we can’t get the job
done alone. And what ASFE has done
in that respect – thanks to our External
Relations Committee – is absolutely
stunning. We have put together the
formative meeting of alliance organi-
zations whose interest is, in essence,
the same as ASFE’s. Seventeen
geoprofessional organizations were
represented at the October 6 meeting.
Just having so many groups sitting
around the same table for anything is
impressive. To have them all focused
on the same goal is remarkable.
As additional elements of our external
relations, we have created a defini-
tion of the geoprofessions
that is now securely ensconced
in Wikipedia; we have updated
our bylaws to create new member-
ship categories (for geoconstructors,
geoprofessionals in government, and
geoprofessional students); and we
have initiated the process of gather-
ing case histories to support our
recently created geoprofessionals’
value proposition (
.
org/index.cfm?pid=11740), namely,
that wise selection and deployment of
geoprofessionals saves owners time
and money while reducing overall
project risk.
The Education Committee is develop-
ing new and more effective ways to
bring all the great ASFE “stuff” into
your firms. One of the most important
new developments in this regard is
creation of the new
ASFE Resource
Catalog
we’ll premier at the
2011 Fall Meeting. Further, we are
launching a new webinar service with
more offerings being developed as I
write.
We have also pursued efforts to
continually enhance our risk-manage-
ment/business-management programs,
services, and materials, so we can deal
effectively with the symptoms of the
commodity/marginalization problem
while elevating our Member Firms’
ability to serve clients as trusted
professional advisors. The Business
Practice Committee issued an excel-
lent new
ASFE Practice Alert
on
safety and another conveying results
of our annual Financial Performance
Survey. And hats off to our extraordi-
narily productive Construction Materi-
als Engineering and Testing (CoMET)
Committee, which has produced three
documents on quality assurance; one
in the form of a report or proposal
insert sheet, one in the form of a mes-
sage to owners, and one as a mes-
sage to architects, civil engineers,
and structural engineers. And just for
good measure, the Committee also
developed a new ASFE Practice Alert
about the new ACI 301 initial field-
curing standard, identifying ambigui-
ties and how to deal with them. We
have also initiated a comprehensive
refinement of Peer Review. If all that
isn’t enough, the Emerging Issues and
Trends Committee has looked into
the crystal ball on our behalf, and will
report on findings and recommenda-
tions at our 2011 Fall Meeting.
I believe it’s also appropriate to point
out that ASFE is taking a strong
position in the field of sustainabil-
ity, becoming a charter member of
the Institute for Sustainable Infrastruc-
ture and developing a statement on
sustainability we are fulfilling in part
by converting
ASFE NewsLog
to an
e-newsletter only and by eliminating
much of the paper we used to distrib-
ute at meetings (we’ve even gone so
far as to create a smart-phone meeting
app you can download for free for
your Android, iPhone, iPad, Black-
berry, or Windows Mobile device).
Looking ahead, your Board of Direc-
tors has almost completed the new,
2012-2015 Strategic Plan that we’ll
unveil at the 2012 Winter Leader-
ship Conference, as we continue our
long-term efforts to overcome the
marginalization and commoditization
of geoprofessionals, one three-year
bite at a time
