From the Desk of the AITP President

I am going to climb on my soapbox today and make a statement. I hear criticism all the time that the Association is not doing this, and is not doing that. What or who do you think the Association is? The Association is a group of a few volunteers who have to do too much, because there are too few of them. The Association Board of Directors consists of five Officers and eight Directors who are elected to govern the Association. To me, that means we set direction and policy. In an ideal world, Officers and Directors would not have to be committee chairs or worse yet, function as a single person committee.

We have four primary Service Areas, each headed by two Directors: Association Development, Chapter and Region Support, Membership, and Operations. Each Service Area has four to five committees or task forces. In most of those service areas, Directors have to serve on several committees, or worse, chair them. My point is that we need more association committee members and chairpersons. We have several committees that have no chairperson or members, so the work either doesn't get done or a Director has to see it gets done.

To paraphrase a great President, whose life was abbreviated, "Ask not what your association can do for you, but what you can do for your association”. With more volunteers, more work can get done, more people can spend a reasonable amount of time doing association work, and both the association and the members are better off.

Please, review the association organization chart at http://www.aitp.org/resource/resmgr/abod_documents/aitp_2013_organization_char.xlsx and volunteer for a committee. Once you find a committee that you’re interested in, send an email to volunteers@aitp.org or vicepresident@aitp.org. Either email address will get your name to the appropriate person.

In less than four weeks, our biggest activity of the year will be over, the National Collegiate Conference in St. Louis, April 4 – 6. About six hundred student members and a couple hundred professionals, including both the AITP and Foundation for Information Technology Education (FITE) Boards of Directors, will have experienced a fatiguing, but very rewarding three days.

If you are a student member, you are really missing out on a fantastic opportunity to meet with companies looking for the IT leaders of tomorrow and compete in contests to see how you match up to other IT student members from all across the country. If you’re a professional member and have not attended an NCC, you are really missing out on a tremendous experience. This will be my ninth consecutive, and not last, NCC. This is the single activity which keeps me active with the association in a leadership role. These (mostly) young people, the students, are an inspiring motivation to me, each time I attend.

Make your plans to attend now. It will be worth it. I hope to see you there.