The beginning of a New Year is often a time for reflecting about the past year as well as looking forward to the coming one. With this in mind, I too want to do exactly that, and offer these reflections on the Institute of Instrumentation, Control and Automation Australia (IICA) of which I am currently Federal President.
The Institute’s decisions over the last two years to embark on a number of significant reforms will enable the IICA to enhance its visibility, influence and most importantly, practical relevance within the wider community and to the instrumentation, control and automation (IC&A) sectors of industry and business. Let me explain what I mean.
The IICA’s Federal Council resolved that it had to reach out beyond its immediate confines in order to influence appropriate decision makers to assist organizations like ours to help seek solutions to specifically identified problems that affect different areas within the IC&A fields from time to time.
For example, the IICA is currently working with a number of partner organisations and companies within the civil and defence aerospace maintenance areas to find appropriate solutions to certain matters of concern, which we hope will receive endorsement from both CASA and Defence regulators.
Likewise, we have become increasingly aware that an organisation like ours can play an increasingly greater role in advocating and working within the TAFE and University sectors.
Of particular interest at the moment is the need to advocate and influence those persons and committees who devise tertiary curricula to include a more equitable focus on IC&A subjects and topics – which tend to be too often simply ‘add-ons’ to other subjects.
Of equal importance to our long term strategies has been the considerable expansion and reworking of the previous Corporate Associates Program (CAP).
This Membership category had been particularly attractive and very relevant to largely the supplier and service provider companies in the IC&A sectors but has not sufficiently addressed the needs of companies on the reverse side of the coin.
The new Corporate Industry Program (CIP) seeks to do that. It embraces and caters for the professional needs and interests of not only the supplier and service provider companies but also to those end user, consultant, contractor, maintenance, education departments and companies.
They all will now find it in their interests to check out our website, and seriously think about joining as CIP Members.
In summary, the decisions taken in the past two years by the IICA have taken root and are each at different stages of development.
Our expectation is that 2012 will be a busy and fruitful one and we extend an invitation to each and every one of the readers of PACE – those not already Members – to join us in our endeavours.
[Brett Simpson is President IICA.]