About this issue

A perennial subject of discussion among members of the editorial group of this Transactions and the administrative group of our parent organization — the Engineering Management Society (EMS) of IEEE is: “Why can´t we get more papers from practitioners?” For a professional technical society we have had a reasonably good mix of papers from academic researchers and practitioners in industry and government, but we would like to shift the balance even more toward the practitioner side. The problem, of course, is that people engaged in managing technical activities such as Research, Development, and Engineering (RD&E) do not have the time or the incentive to publish technical articles in professional society journals. This is also true for engineers and scientists working in technical fields for industrial companies. In general, there is little reward for the hard and sometimes frustrating work of writing (and frequently rewriting, when the reviews come in) an article of publishable quality and lasting scientific or technical value.