May 2006

An Interview with Joe Bordogna

By Chris McManes

IEEE-USA recently honored Dr. Joseph Bordogna, an IEEE Fellow and former deputy director and chief operating officer of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Bordogna sat down down with Today's Engineer for an in-depth interview on a wide range of subjects of interest to engineers, including the valuable role of engineering; the importance of communication skills; developing an entrepreneurial spirit; and engineering in a global economy. The following is the text of that interview, conducted on 4 March 2006 at the IEEE-USA leadership workshop in St. Louis, Mo.

Dr. Bordogna, is currently the Alfred Fitler Moore professor of engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and previously served as the director of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. He is an IEEE fellow and former IEEE president whose career has spanned more than 45 years.

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TE: Congratulations on the IEEE-USA distinguished public service award that you will be receiving tonight.

DR. BORDOGNA: Thank you very much. I'm very proud to receive this award and, in fact, when I did get notice of it, I looked at this wonderful, grand photograph I have on the wall of my office, of a meeting of the members attending the first national meeting in 1916 of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and it's a beautiful picture and I've got this large copy. Right smack in the middle is Alexander Graham Bell and many other famous engineers we came to know after that, and [I] was feeling very good about the base they left for us to work with in our careers.

TE: Are you enjoying your return to teaching future engineers at the University of Pennsylvania?

DR. BORDOGNA: Yes; very much. I've been there, now, a short time, but I'm getting very busy responding to people who want me to get involved in things I enjoy, like the Filippi [?] Coalition for K-12 education, like the Ben Franklin Partnership, which is a state group that helps entrepreneurs bring their ideas to market. To work with the university with its new president, who has a goal, among some others, of knowledge integration, which I think's very important for the future of engineers' careers. So I'm having a good time.

TE: Well, that's good to hear.

You first came to NSF as the head of the directorate of engineering and, in 1999, former President Bill Clinton named you deputy director, and following Senate confirmation, you assumed your new role.

What gives you the most pride, from your service at NSF?

DR. BORDOGNA: I think the cooperation and energy generated among the NSF staff who are committed to the nation and ensuring that new knowledge is created so it can be used in the marketplace of ideas, and keep our country strong and competitive, and help create wealth for the country.

TE: Speaking of our country, the United States has been the world's technology leader for many years, and what steps do you think we can take to maintain that position?

DR. BORDOGNA: Well, it depends on how you define leadership. I think the nation still has a formidable base to continue this leadership, realizing that the world, especially in science and engineering, is very much connected, these days.

So keeping the knowledge base of the country rich and new and fresh allows entrepreneurs, and others, to have a knowledge base to develop ideas and move the ideas into the marketplace.

Many times taking risks to create new enterprises, and new enterprises, by taking knowledge and applying it to things that are new and different, creates enterprises that can grow and need a workforce to make things happen, and this kind of continuing, creating the knowledge, and taking to the marketplace, is probably the best assurance that the economy can be robust and that the workforce in the country can participate.

TE: In your keynote address today, you said that the IEEE should actively participate in NSF's work on cyber infrastructure. Would you please elaborate on that?

DR. BORDOGNA: Well, first of all, I've had this feeling for some time, that not only IEEE but all the professional societies in engineering should interact with each other to create partnerships with — participate in these partnerships between academia, the government and the private sector. So that everybody can make good use of their talents.

For example, the private sector creates the wealth. Academe creates a workforce, hopefully a robust one that goes out in the marketplace to help create that wealth, and the government's a great enabler.

And so if they're all on the same page, arguing about what to do, but they're all on the same page, become partners, they can move the economy ahead together well and we can prosper in all of that.

So the IEEE, this being an IEEE meeting, I just wanted to make the point that IEEE — which is doing — and particularly IEEE-USA in this country, making good connections and being party to the political democratic process, put their skills, their strengths, and their ideas into the mix of this partnership, and we'll all benefit.

And so every piece of that partnership should do that and the IEEE should be robust in it.

And again keeping in mind that the IEEE's global, and that's a big advantage for all of us. It's a global economy and so being savvy about globalness is what the IEEE can bring, including the IEEE-USA can bring, to the issues which exists around the world, but in this country can work to everybody's benefit, including the rest of the world.

TE: Also in your keynote address today, you spoke about engineering often not being included alongside the importance of science and technology.

Can you expand on that point and explain how important you think engineers are to our nation's and our world's economic prosperity and quality of life?

DR. BORDOGNA: Well, I said, sort of as a personal issue, that whenever I hear science and technology I don't hear engineering, and the reason I — I'm not concerned about it but I want to see it here in the mix because science is certainly critical because that's where discovery's made. So scientists look at the universe and they figure out what's going on. And that's critical.

And they produce a knowledge base. But engineers participate in that, especially engineers who are engineering scientists, where engineering's the adjective and scientist is the noun, and they're participating, and that's very, very important, so you get that good mix, working together. They do it well. But engineering itself, as a profession, is a process of looking at open-ended issues in life, seeing what the constraints and the opportunities are, coming to some kind of resolution of maybe we can move in a certain direction, and then they participate and move in that direction, get the job done.

So it's a very creative thing in the sense of engineers create what has not been. If you make a discovery about a new planet, it's been there, the discovery's critical and we learn about it, what's on the planet and all those things wonderful, be done by scientists in lots of different disciplines.

Engineer's job is to take that knowledge and get it into the marketplace somehow, and generally, increasingly now, engineers design things and they create new things by their designs, and it's very important for engineers today and this is where IEEE can help — to make sure that when you design, or consciously, most designs represent their intent for society, and we have to think about that more importantly than ever before.

Environment's certainly one of them. There are many issues in which you're designing something, you now design for society and you make sure, even when you're creating something, it's going to be non-damaging, useful in many, many ways.

So this is an important task of engineers, and they're in the mix, so engineering's a process. Technology is stuff. It's maybe systems, it may be ideas, it may be artifacts, it may be products. In many cases, it's the tool that you need to get things done.

And of course what's happening in our society is those tools change, get more robust and more exotic. They empower us more and the engineers — so that's technology — but the engineers must take that and move through the process and get something out in society for the benefit of it, in many ways.

And, to me, there's no conflict between creating wealth, as long as it's shared somehow. That's a political argument. It's not going to be good if it's just owned by a few people. So that's how society goes, and you move it, and you can tax it, and so on. So they participate in enabling that to happen.

And the other part is they have to keep their minds on doing things well for society. There's this interesting little phrase we use, that we educate our engineers to do things right.

They can design with panache. They're astute in their designs. But it's more important to do the right things.

So the combination of that is what organizations like the IEEE should breed into our engineers.

So when I think of all that, when you say science and technology, that piece is not expressed without saying engineering in there. Now I'm not going to argue — science and technology is in our rhetoric and we use it, but when I talk to engineers, particularly, I want to make sure that they know that they're party to this, and they're not just technology. They're engineers, and they've got to make things happen.

TE: On a basic level, engineering is often described as the bridge between scientific discovery and the products and services, the technology that's brought to the marketplace.

DR. BORDOGNA: Yeah, and that's the heady kind of career. I mean, it's exciting to be an engineer. And one thing we have, when we talk about these things, we have to make sure that the scientists and the engineers, and the entrepreneurs are partners in these things, and so "bridge" is a good word, and it's bridging back and forth for everybody.

Without the bridges, we're not going to get these ideas implemented and out into the world for the benefit of everyone.

TE: Many U.S. industry leaders and CEOs say the United States has a shortage of engineers and scientists, and if this is true, we should probably be seeing a large increase in engineers' salaries. Instead, the last published IEEE-USA Salary and Fringe Benefit Survey, in 2004, showed the first drop in US IEEE members' median salaries in 31 years.

Does the U.S. really have a significant shortage of engineers and scientists?

DR. BORDOGNA: Well, I've always chose not to get into that discussion because only the marketplace can determine that, and we know, over the years, this has been a controversial thing, and it happens and it doesn't happen, and that's because it's hard to predict what you need.

And it's increasingly hard to predict because technology changes so quickly, and people become more productive.

So you think, well, maybe don't need as many cause you're productive. On the other hand, new technologies drive new enterprises, which you need more, and what's more, while you need engineers who can morph into being able to do the new enterprise, so engineers are critical in all this, and just to me it's fruitless to talk about shortages. More importantly, here, is what is the education of an engineer? What's expected of an engineer, if you're going to be one? And that's a big issue in which the country has been spending some time on the last 20 years, and entities like the National Science Foundation makes investments, and not to change the engineer from this to that, but to create an education, an enterprise in which engineers can grow, and understand that the big job is for them to be able to morph into new things.

So then you start talking about what are the fundamentals. Like electrical engineering is the fundamentals of electric circuits, electromagnetics. Well, that's a skill set and you have to — an engineer cannot move ahead unless you know what the universe is about. So science is very important. The scientists discover all this; that's got to be in your tool kit. But that's not engineering. Engineering is what do you do with that, and engineers need more than that today.

You're talking mathematics. You need that skill. But that doesn't make you an engineer per se. And then you have to be worried about — not worried — but in your designs you have to consider the economics.

I used to work at RCA, and if you worked on military things, it didn't matter whether you put it in a platinum electrode in somewhere to make the solution straightforward. With a commercial operation, you can't afford to do that cause you won't be able to sell the thing at a reasonable price in a competitive market.

So all these issues are important for engineers to learn. Increasingly. the environment, and make things so they don't impact the environment. Recycling's part of it. And I can go on.

So the engineers' playing field is very broad and includes everything in life, and how, when new technology comes the engineers have to learn about it, but move it into the same process.

For example, when you look at an open-ended issue, you have there the constraints and the environment and so on. You have there the opportunities because you have new technologies to make something new, or to improve on something that's around, and you can use those technologies to help the environment, or you can use those new technologies to beat your competition by selling something cheaper because you have a greater design, cause you're using new technologies.

And as long as an engineer rolls along with that and keeps up to date, which is hard to do but exciting to do, then that's the more important thing than shortage or excess.

Now the bottom line here about salaries, to me, is if you become an engineer who can analyze things well, increasingly, because technology changes so fast, you become a commodity, but on the world market at the cheapest price. And that's not engineering. That's taking a party of someone who looked at the open-ended agenda, developed a whole new thing, and then they give parts to people to analyze.

I tell you, that if you are the holistic engineer who can look at the open-ended issue and make something out of it, get something out the door, in street language, you will get paid well because either yourself, in your own company, or in a corporate setting, that's what the process needs.

And most students, if they get involved in an educational milieu, which has that as an envelop, do well, and that's what you have to do.

So engineering, like everything else — suppose you're a physician today. Medicine changes radically. So you're not doing heart operations like you did 10 years ago. So you have to get up to date, and it's a continuing education, but that's even a soft way to look at it. You have to be functionally literate in what's going on. You just can't know about it, and you can't really do much with anything as you're morphing, unless your skill set is strong.

So, you know, math and science are obvious ones but learning how to — you have the zealous argument all the time of taking — of writing courses, and so on. It's a deeper issue. Engineers, when they want to take risk or they want to move a frontier, which most people are reticent about, are skittish cause it's risky, they have to be able to influence. And that's the word to use.

Can you go into a group and influence them, so your idea's accepted? And that has two pieces. One is if that works, you know, money's made, and I'm saying "money" in the sense of wealth creation that can be taxed and shared, and move things along and create jobs.

So that's one way to look at it. The other way is that's exciting, if you can get an idea, which engineers do a lot, so it's part of the game, and then you have others invest in it and accept it, that's probably the biggest high you can get as an engineer, cause your thing is going to go out the door and it's going to create sales, but, more importantly, it's going to do something good for society.

So, you know, the shortage and the excesses argument I steer clear away from because those aren't the issues to me.

TE: One of the IEEE-USA presidential candidates today talked about some of those soft skills that you just mentioned, the ability to influence your colleagues and others, and people that control the purse strings, and he mentioned that he thought this was one of the main values that IEEE-USA brings to IEEE members, where you can be taught leadership skills, negotiation skills, presentation skills, and certainly anybody in your situation, to rise to that level in the government you have to have those good skills.

DR. BORDOGNA: Well, that's part of it, but you brought up a subject, and I agree with this comment the IEEE member made fully, but one thing that we have to be careful about, I'm going to use this opportunity to evoke it, is these are not soft skills.

One of the issues I had, I was in the Navy, I was in industry, and then I went to academe. In academe, you get tenure, and so on, which is appropriate for being in depth in something. You're the world's expert on that.

And the disciplines, across the entire frontier, are variable, in a sense, of what they are, but to me, not in the sense of one's harder or softer than the other.

So you get this hard science vis-à-vis — and I won't use versus — is a balance of soft science, and I just — it took me a while to learn this because I didn't go from a Ph.D. to a faculty position, had these other — and I didn't quite know why I was feeling this way but my experiences in life were such that I was very integrated. That's how you got things done in the Navy. That's how you got things done at RCA.

In academe, to move academe you have to do that, but academe is rooted in folks knowing things, in depth, and they've got to share that stuff.

So why is social science called "soft" when the hardest thing to do in life is resolve the problems of the cities, for example, or to know what to do when you have 9/11 and the impact of that socially on the city of New York, and elsewhere, and the whole country, and the world?

And you see what's happened out of that. It's a very difficult situation. So it's easier to go to the moon than to do that. So I think hard vers — and I'm using this as an example of, that disciplines have to work and morph and overlap, and if we categorize one being hard, one being soft, then you know how it's going to be viewed.

You're going to review the hard ones and not the soft ones. So I spend a lot of time at NSF. NSF has social sciences. It has a directorate for social behavior and economic sciences, and we were trying at NSF, still are now, we decided to lift the social sciences was an imperative, and so how do you lift them?

You're probably not going to lift them by saying let's invest in social, economic scientists, cause there's this long history of, "Well, they're soft, you should invest in physics."

That argument is not a very healthy argument, because, to me, it's meaningless. You've got to see where the investment should be overall. This is a holistic engineering kind a look at things.

So what's important right now in our history, with all we've learned in the social sciences and in physics, everything, all knowledge based.

Our issues around the world, human and social dynamics, one way to say it, and we use that formally at NSF.

And so we decided we're going to make a big investment in human social dynamics, and it was going to be at equal value to nanotechnology. Now, you know, one is hard and one's soft? No. Human social dynamics is probably harder to do.

So I think the issue here is to make sure that as we move along, all disciplines are equally important, and we invest in them in ways that are rigorous, and in depth, and on merit, and on accountability, and we do it equally with every one of them.

So now one thing, last thing I'll say about this cause we could talk about it a long time, I wanted to get the hint of this in here. But human social dynamics as a part — and human social dynamics, by the way, is run by the entire NSF executives. Not social behavior science owned by a directorate head, you know, it's very important. So the entire group at NSF, leadership, runs this thing, and we're trying to put a lot of resources into it.

The key issue now, that's very exciting, is these new tools we have in line to do our work, are very powerful and formidable. The playing that to the social sciences is very, very meaningful. I want you to contrast about shortages and all that kind of stuff we talk about. This is more important to talk about.

One of the issues in social sciences is — and one reason they may have referred to it as soft but it's more complicated than this — is they have so much data, and they couldn't handle it, couldn't mine it, they couldn't arrange it, and so they had to infer a lot, and that's sort of, you know, in a objective way, that's sort of challengeable.

So they got this aura about them. But now, with terra-scale computing becoming ubiquitous, everybody can use, and eventually pay the scale of computing power, and the databases are getting to be able to be big, and our capacity to mind them well. So the social sciences are going to have better research tools that consider all the data, and they can do their work in a way that may be more acceptable, in a scholarly way, for the people who say hard and soft.

But in any case, this is very difficult stuff, and in many ways it's much more complex and hard than anything else. So I took time to talk about this cause it's an important issue, and the IEEE, as well as IEEE-USA, which is, by the way, replicated in certain places around the world, these things in all the countries are important, and IEEE, say, contributes to that within the umbrella of IEEE.

You talk about being able to influence and you talk about being able to present yourself, and all these things you mentioned, that's a social science effort that's got to be part of an engineer's tool kit, not something on the side. To me, that's equal, for an engineer, to math and science.

So one bottom-line issue is here — you don't minimize the skill set that's always been needed there. You're going to do this, you can't do that. You've got to have that strength cause you can't do engineering without it.

But you need this other strength also, to me, as much as you do the others. So it's not replacing one or making soft engineers. It's an important part of the tool kit.

TE: And that's part of what you had talked about, the holistic engineer and the more well-rounded you are, the more likely that you're going to stay employed.

DR. BORDOGNA: That's correct. Rather just stay employed, but you're going to be able to move, and you're prepared to move, as the technology's going to be changing all the time. So there are new issues out there. So it's not only learning about the new technology. It's fitting that into these other skills you have to have to move the technology in the marketplace, because developing just a technology is not going to lead to a career in itself as an engineer. If you're good at that — first of all, you have to be good in some skill, some special in depth, because then you bring that to the table.

So, you know, generally, when you get at these issues, and look at it more simply, you've got a group of people around a table — okay, what should we do? And you want everybody at the table to be in depth. I don't care what kind of depth it is but, certainly, with new technology at least some technical depth, but you want some social science there, and so on.

And they argue like crazy. They've all done their homework and they attack this issue, and then somebody at the head of the table has to make a judgment. There's no algorithm for this. So in order to [be] effective, and affect leadership, since engineers create the stuff in the end, you have to be party to that, and then you will have a good career, exciting career, and it'll be valuable, and people will pay for you. So if you're just going to be a software person who's going to be given software things to code, well, yeah, it's okay, you can be but the salaries — you know — a lot of people around the world can do that.

TE: Another controversial subject is offshore outsourcing or what's been called offshoring.

Many engineers and federal policy makers think that our nation's significant offshore outsourcing of high-tech engineering and information technology jobs to lower-cost countries is reducing the United States' capacity to innovate, and I was wondering what you thought about this. Do you think the offshoring phenomenon is ultimately in the best interests of our country?

DR. BORDOGNA: Yes, I tend to look at things in — all things that happen in life, they happen. I mean, the world's moving. As I said, today, it's turning on its axis, whether it's round, flat or spikey, and there's a discussion on, which is a healthy discussion about all of this. But I tend to try to look at the opportunities available.

To me, having been at NSF, the capacity of the country at the frontier, in research and education, is formidable, and other countries are starting to copy it.

So I start from there because without a knowledge base, you can't do much of anything.

So now if that knowledge base is going to the marketplace quickly, you have an edge. If that knowledge base isn't put in the marketplace and others do it, then you're at a disadvantage.

So competitively, it's not enough to invest in the creation of knowledge. You have to have a way to partner that with getting wealth created, and so this is an entrepreneurial issue that engineers should have a feeling for because it's important to their job. It won't get out the door unless they're entrepreneurial. That doesn't mean being an entrepreneur, they're important as well, but every engineer should have the sense of, hey, I got this new thing, but they should be party, in some way to, by influencing others in their idea, to get it out the door. They may want to go do something new with it or they may want to stay where they are and keep creating this new knowledge.

But there has to be some brokering done here, of moving that knowledge into the marketplace. So I tend to think of "let's get this knowledge base done well all the time, and keep at it, and let's make sure that it gets into the marketplace."

So I look at these partnerships, and the government can invest in them, not in — you don't want to have the government get into the private sector job of carrying out the venture, but you can, I think, correctly use brokering money, taxpayers' money for this, and you don't need large amounts, to help bring the parties together.

For example, up in Rochester [N.Y], photographic film isn't what it used to be. Okay. Here's a big change in technology and what happens? Does Kodak get destroyed? Kodak is doing electronic cameras, and so on, they're creatively transforming their company. But up there they have paper mills. So what do they do with all of this?

Well, to make a long story short, in our country, since we've been so high tech, and we have these problems of moving to a new venue, and what to do with the jobs, as well as everything else, with the venue we have which was so successful, and you want to make sure that's done as painlessly as possible, but the world is not — they're electronic now with these films, with photographs. So what do you do?

So anyhow, there's a lot of good technology in the universities up there. There is capacity there to move to a new frontier they're developing at some of the universities up there

So we had at NSF a partnership for innovation program, where they can get some resources as a team, they come in and say, look, we're trying to move the economy here in a certain direction and we need some glue money to make sure that we can bring us together, to have us meet and take some issues, and this has been a very successful investment around the country, to help change that.

So I look again as — the only way I can look at it is as an opportunity. If you do it well, then you relieve the issues that are very painful. If you fight it, the rest of the world's going on, and you're probably going to be a laggard instead of a leader.

So the knowledge base, the ability to create the knowledge is formidable, and the reason is, by the way, it's open, and it's merit, and it's competition among the proposals which get the funds to do this. So it's very rich, it's very good, and it's enviable, some other places in the world that we have this, and others are trying to emulate this, which is good too because more knowledge gets created.

So I think the United States is in a good position to retain leadership because of the formidable process we have for creating the knowledge, but we have to ensure that knowledge gets in the marketplace.

Now if people in other countries are going to grab it, since it's open, well, we have to make sure that we're doing it, and I think we can keep ahead of this.

Everything eventually becomes a commodity and now — you used to have long windows to make an investment. In fact, you know, it's like the generation gap between parents and children. It's maybe four or five years, now, [the] generation gap.

It used to be 40 years, then it was 30 years, then it's 20 years. So these changes used to be slow; now they're fast. So you have to be agile, you have to be rapid, and you have to grab the moment.

So my view is let's do this thing, and get it moving, and, you know, the world is global as we look at it because it's interconnected. If you look at what's going on, one way is the Internet's connected everybody and you have the wisdom of the world available to you, that phrase that the inventor of the mouse put into play. A lot of ways to say it. You have [New York Times reporter Tom] Friedman with the flattening world, that's flattened it. So be it; that's it. You can't retract and besides, we caused it, so we should be pretty good in it, and be able to compete in it.

And you want to have a capitalistic society. If you like capitalism, just free rein, like everything else it will get out of control. Just like social efforts can move over to socialism, then communism. You have to keep the balance; otherwise, an argument in the Congress. That's what's good about our country. You can put those things in play in the Congress, it's messy, get all the arguments on the table, and something will happen, that's generally good for our country.

So we have to pay attention to this and ensure that the enabling power of the government, which it does, is done in a way that keeps the United States competitive.

So that's the way I look at it. The offshoring and the outsourcing, I mean those are things that were in play, and they happen because technology moved it. And if you're in a capitalistic society — that's the reason I brought capitalism up, marketplace capitalism means you've got to get stuff out the door and you're going to sell it if you can keep the price low and you have high productivity and you've got new ideas, and so you have the world workforce accessible to you.

So we've got to make sure our workforce is more than competitive. I mean, we have a foreign role base from which we can move from the ideas into the marketplace. Our workers should be able to do that.

So we ought to focus on making sure we have a world class size and a dream workforce that can do this.

TE: And our U.S. engineers today are competing with engineers from all over the world.

DR. BORDOGNA: That's correct. What are you going to do? Are you going to close the gates? I think the issue about closing the gates and trying to keep things closed, which everybody, I think, agrees is not going to work, is an agonizing sort of one kind a choice to do.

But, you know, you ought to move things around the world, you're going to sell them, and you've got to be able to do that well. I think the United States is positioned for a long time to do that well. Our process is free and democratic and it's open. So, yeah, there's lots of arguments here. It's complicated. But that's my view. My view is seize the opportunity, make sure our workforce is skilled; what's the skill set? That's what we're arguing about. What's the skill set?

Engineers that have good careers need this more in-depth skill set of things that people didn't use — it used to be just technical. Well, it can't be anymore.

TE: Which we talked about a lot earlier, the holistic engineers, and combining the many people skills with the technical skills.

DR. BORDOGNA: Right. I should say something about this.

There are some canonic issues. You know, what's the — one basic issue is academe has grown up on giving the tenure reward, that's one way to look at it, but respecting the ability of people to dig down deep and ferret out the secrets of the universe and be the experts in that, and that's very important.

We know how to do that with panache in this country. We do it by merit and all that. It's just terrific. That's where we get the knowledge base from.

Because of these new tools, that are exotic and empowering, younger professors can take bigger chunks out of the frontier, which is generally lots of disciplines in a chunk, as one piece, and, you know, nature doesn't know disciplinary boundaries. Humans have made a construct, because I think the tools — too simple perhaps — but the tools were rudimentary back in the beginning of all this study. You know, research universities are sort of relatively new since the late 1800's. Recall The German School. Johns Hopkins was the first, all those things.

And we know how to do that stuff, and openly, and it's great, and there's a lot of argument with it, and we move it ahead. So what's happened is you get credit for tenure, or I should say it a more general way — you get revered for your ability to do that process. That's very important because you bring credibility to a table in which there are lots of disciplines around.

And so you can't really participate in crossing the boundary unless you have yours in hand. You do homework for these meetings, and so on, and then you cross the boundaries in there, and with these new instruments, you get data differently, and data almost comes automatic. So you have a situation where the new knowledge is increasingly creative, where the boundaries bang against each other. And you said in engineering, Well, bioengineering's a big thing now. And what is that? That's several disciplines bouncing against each other, and some disciplines — like electrical engineering, for example.

What is electrical engineering? Actually really has many, many societies, and all this is happening because the world's changing. So you can't just retain what you used to do. You have to morph it to meet this new kind of thing.

So the scholarship for integration and diversity is an issue. Many times, if you're an integrative professor, you're at par hole with tenure. I'm saying this in a soft way, because all this is morphing now.

So independence is important. That's the revered way, the reductionist way to take the frontier. Build these things. And we need to develop some kind of way to revere the scholarship of integration as well as the scholarship of reductionism. It's a big issue and many experiments at this are going on.

So the integrative thing for engineers is a winner for engineering because engineers should be integrated. Lots of things. They can't just be in one place. They've got to be able to move and cross — but especially for engineers, because they're the ones who create the new stuff, and the new stuff depends on these cross-boundary things.

So it's simple and it's complicated at the same time. It's a simple idea and it makes sense, but doing it is very complicated because you have a built infrastructure in academe that doesn't quite work that way.

But academe in this country is well ahead of the rest of the world in accessing this issue and doing this something with it. That's very powerful for having engineers, or anyone who graduates with a baccalaureate especially, able to do well in the world. That's a generic issue, no matter what discipline you're in.

If you can reach across and you can pull things together, generally, in life, that's what most people are employed for. So I mean academe and some research labs are employed to dig deep and that's important too.

There's one thing we ought to be very careful [about] here, is when you start talking about integrative, people start talking about soft again, you know, and that's the problem of non-reverence for it. But if there's no intent of minimizing what we do well, that's critical, and this is not, to me, an add-on, it's a way to be functionally literate across some boundaries so you can perform better, and you get paid more for that.

So that's an issue in engineering; it's a big issue.

TE: You have been active in the IEEE and IEEE activities for many years. But most U.S. electrical, electronic, software engineers are not members of the IEEE. What can you say to help convince these engineers that IEEE membership is valuable to their professional career?

DR. BORDOGNA: I think IEEE probably has the best array of assets to help enable lots of kinds of engineers, actually, let alone confusion with computing, and electrical and IT, and all these words, by the way, that aren't defined very well.

So these assets are this scope that the IEEE covers. In fact we know that others, disciplines like mechanical engineering, for example, subscribe to — I'd like to know that number, by the way, myself — subscribe to IEEE journals in computing, and so on.

So that's just one example of the asset base that IEEE has, intellectually, for enabling members' careers.

So it's a bigger issue than just IT and all these kinds of things. It's lots of different disciplines. The issue to me is if we can find a good way for the IEEE to provide a service to the members — and I saw yesterday, most of them are industrial. What do they need? They've got to get something out the door. They have to cross the boundaries.

If we can find a way to serve them by enabling them better to cross the boundaries of the journals and the societies, that would be very powerful, I think attractive to the folks you're talking about. Plus others. So, to me, that's one construct for moving this thing ahead, and I feel fairly strongly about it.

You might imagine so, because all the other things we're talking about here relate to that very thing. It's integration across the boundaries. And that's what you need to do to have a good job, get a good salary, because industry, anything in life that produce — it's an enterprise of some kind, the Red Cross, for example, whatever it is, or a church, or — you know, the leaders there need to bring seemingly disparate things together and get something done.

I say often "out the door" because I'm thinking of a product like an engineer, but getting things done or going out the door means you get to where you need to go, and you can't do it unless you have these skills of being able to work with others and work with lots of different things, which are seemingly disparate. I can say that every once in a while, because maybe they're not as different as we think.

So that's a big intellectual issue, and the IEEE has the capacity to address that, and it tries. It's a very complex issue. But to go to the future, I think for IEEE to be optimized, to morph, continually morph into what it should be, needs to be able to use its assets in this more collective way, and then I think it'd be more attractive.

That's the way I would look at trying to detect a problem on the first phase of things.

I should mention here, before we leave this, I remember when there was some discussion, actually when I was president, about "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers" — is that the name? or it is "IEEE"? — and surveys were done where more people, lay people and so on, if you say "Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers", they didn't know what it was. But if you said "IEEE," everybody knew that.

It's the brand. And why did they know it? Because they see it in standards. They see it in the plugs they put in their computers, and it's a powerful branding thing.

So IEEE, I should tell you, IEEE is enormously respected in the halls of Congress, and it was mentioned at some of the discussions this morning, and so was ASME [American Society of Mechanical Engineers].

You know, these professional societies, they have credibility with the people who make policy. So it's powerful. It's part of a combination of things. And they're this brand. You know, you hear IEEE, your ears pick up. And what is IEEE? Well, it should be the organization that has these assets that can help the morphing of everything a we move along, and that's a proud responsibility. That's not quite — well, yeah, to me, in a sense — to me, I can't say it wasn't like that before because all these things we're talking about were in place.

The thing that's different now is the invention of new technologies; new discoveries that lead to new technology is so fast, that it keeps banging on the system all the time and you don't have time to rest, to say, have 20 years in which something can work, and you can have an enterprise that's creating wealth and has jobs and all that.

The thing changes all the time. That is a fact. That is a fact. And you can't put the genie back in the bottle and you can't put a stopper to keep the genie from coming out in the first place, because somebody could do it in a basement somewhere. You know, people create knowledge. People have wisdom. And that's why the Internet is so powerful.

All these people are putting stuff on there, and as [Douglas] Englebart, [the inventor of the computer mouse], said, you're gathering the collective wisdom of the world.

It's moving fast. Who better than IEEE has the chance, with all these people sort of impacting [inaudible] are truly members, in many cases, if not most cases. This is a powerful strategy for the IEEE, and it can be very attractive. But not the way it was 30 years ago.

I mentioned today about how, to some people, about how I have on my wall in my office this grand photograph, grand being big, rendition of a picture of the members attending the first national meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, which was a predecessor to the IEEE, 1916. You know, AIE was started long before that but that was the first national meeting.

Now in those days [inaudible] and things like that. And everybody was there. And what a picture it is. It's got Alexander Graham Bell sitting in the middle with a longneck phone on the table. And all these astute-looking people there who are the great engineers of the time and I'm thinking they thought the same — they were creating new enterprises, you know, this was going on there. It was the telephone. I mean, it changed the way communications is done.

And now Internet's changing the way communications is done, and podcasting and everything else, is just happening like lightning, so that, you know, industries can be born of a day and they can die of a day.

And that's the difference. I don't think, canonically, the principles that move this along, which essentially [is a] capitalistic marketplace endeavor, and having a good knowledge base so ideas can go in the marketplace, they're robust now and this happened quickly, and the way we operate with is just challenging, more challenging than ever.

So I don't think it's much different.

TE: Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers and listeners today?

DR. BORDOGNA: Well, we're talking about IEEE today, and a lot of what we're talking about is generic for many things in life, and that's a good thing to say about IEEE. It's "with it," it's been in the mix. And the engineers really have a chance here to make these organizations more meaningful, more enabling than they have been, and we should work at that, and then we won't have to worry and talk too much about being attractive to people.

So I think there's a message here for all of us, and I think everything I've said is not going to be new to anyone. It's just a way of trying to put it all together and make sure we move ahead, and the world can be a good place because of it.

TE: Well, Dr. Bordogna it might not be any new knowledge, but hopefully we've gathered it all together in one place, and our members will find it of value. Not only our members, [but] non-members and prospective members, and I would like to thank you very much for your time this afternoon, and I hope that we'll continue to see you at these IEEE meetings, and I'm sure you'll continue to stay active and keep contributing to the profession. So thank you very much for your time.

DR. BORDOGNA: I'm an engineer. That's the way I'm going to end it.

TE: And I think you said "IEEE forever," today, at the end of your —

DR. BORDOGNA: That's what I said, yes. IEEE forever.

Chris McManes is IEEE-USA's senior public relations coordinator in Washington, D.C. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.