Wednesday 8 August 2007

ANZSI’s future: is there one?


This article was submitted to the ANZSI Newsletter for August 2007 but refused publication.

Last month I wrote an article suggesting that the ANZSI Council had outlived its usefulness in an age of electronic communications, and that the Council system was causing able and energetic people to waste their energies on paper-shuffling and trivia. This month I want to focus on the consequences of this bureaucratic approach, and particularly the long-term prospects that ANZSI is facing. Readers can find more details, and join the discussion, on the Web at http://ausindexerforum.blogspot.com/.

During the early 1980s I spent a couple of years in the Public Service analysing personnel data – in particular, identifying departments with poor recruitment or promotion strategies. As President in 2006 I was able to apply the same kind of analysis to the ANZSI member database; and the results are grim.

The first point is that ANZSI has not grown significantly in size since the 1980s. Despite the information revolution, despite expanding to take in another country, despite a 20% growth in the populations of Australia and New Zealand, ANZSI membership remains more or less what it was twenty years ago. That in itself suggests ANZSI has lost its way. But looking at membership statistics shows an even more depressing picture.

ANZSI has by now become an organisation with two clusters of members. There is a veteran group, consisting of members who joined in or before the 1990s, which makes up about two-fifths of our membership. A second group consists of new members who joined within the last four years. This group comprises over 50% of members. ANZSI is very good at recruitment – so good, in fact, that if we retained all our new members we could double in size by 2015. But our size stays the same, because nearly all our new recruits leave within three to four years – roughly 90%, in fact.

ANZSI is a massive disappointment to new members. Whatever they expect when they join up in such large numbers, they clearly don’t find it. They pay a majority of our membership fees, but they take almost no interest in administration at the Council level, they make little use of ANZSI services, and they soon move on. We don’t know why – the ANZSI Council isn’t interested in the issue, or as far as I can tell even aware of it – but it’s clear that our new recruits are expecting, and paying for, something they don’t get.

Meanwhile the veteran group – largely older members – is dwindling in size due to retirement, burnout and death. The group of willing assistants to whom the Council could once delegate work just isn’t there any more. So we have a third symptom of organisational sclerosis; a steady accumulation of Council funds. These are largely paid by our new members; but for the most part they are stored away in bank accounts and term deposits until long after those members have left. As I indicated in my previous article, spending ANZSI money is hard work; and there’s just no-one left in our band of veterans with energy to spare on extracting Council funds for new projects.

Without support from new members the ANZSI Council will collapse – it is in the process of collapsing now, though it does it like everything else, very slowly. But new members have made it clear they have no interest in the tedious formalities that characterise Council administration. Rather than being a victim of new technology, a Council-free ANZSI could be using it to involve all our members in discussions, to provide for open and genuinely democratic votes, for the submission and discussion of articles, for freeing up funds, for reducing membership fees, for canvassing support for activities and – hopefully – for retaining our new members longer than the three or four years it currently takes them to realise that they’ve wasted their money.

Are you a new ANZSI member? What did you expect from ANZSI? What have you got? Join the discussion at http://ausindexerforum.blogspot.com/.

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