By Katherine Bethany – President, SAVE International
It is Halloween night and I am sitting in an Irish bar in Kyoto, Japan thinking about the fact that I neglected to write my President’s message for Value World. True story, as I could not make this up. So as I enjoy my second adult beverage, or is it my third, I will try to gather my thoughts into some form of coherent thought to challenge you.
In thinking back over the month, one of my challenges is how do we engage our members (or potential members/users of the Value Methodology) in a world that is changing rapidly. I am sitting in this bar writing this on my smart phone and will send it in to the SAVE business office via a free wi-fi connection. You are likely reading this as you commute on your phones. Think back 5 or 10 years ago – this form of communication would not have been possible.
So how are we using these and other new tools in our value studies? I suggest maybe not as effectively as we should be.
The reason I am in Japan is that I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the 50th Annual SJVE/6th Asian Value Engineering Conference. One of the panels I participated on was a discussion about VE and its linkage or use to artificial intelligence or information technology. One interesting note, the term “artificial intelligence” was defined differently at this conference than I would have defined it – another example of the communication differences I pointed out last month, but I digress from my point. The point being, that how we are or are not using the new computer tools and technology is an issue we all must think about.
Thankfully our Certification Board is moving to using the new technologies more effectively, and I hope all of you are doing so as well.
Print 
PDF