Acronym

So it's now 2010, and we wouldn't be doing our blogging duties without somehow marking the new year and decade.

I don't have any bold predictions to make, so I'll take a look in the opposite direction. I dug up the January 2000 issue of Association Management, ASAE's magazine prior to the ASAE/Center merger. Turns out the Jan. 2000 issue was the "Leadership Issue" for boards, so I jumped to the February issue to review instead. I was interested to see what was on the minds of associations 10 years ago, before social media, before lobbying reform, before the housing boom and crash, before iPods and iPhones, before 9/11, and before I finished high school.

Here's some what I found:

Outsourcing: The cover story of the February 2000 issue was an in-depth look at outsourcing trends in associations. By the looks of it, outsourcing various functions was already a fairly common practice in 2000, and the article offers a good foundation for any associations that started or expanded their outsourcing practices in the next 10 years. Outsourcing as we knew it in 2000 has taken on new, deeper capacities today, as we see associations beginning to adopt cloud computing and virtual staffing models.

Change: An otherwise excellent feature on industry benchmarking starts with an argument that irks me: "You aren't imagining it. Change really is moving at a faster pace." It then points out that internet adoption was faster than adoption of the television, which was faster than the electric light, which was faster than the telephone. I can't refute these facts, but can the pace of change increase forever? Will we one day measure change in minutes, seconds, or milliseconds?

Maybe it's just a pet peeve of mine, but the notion that "the world is changing faster than ever before" is hyperbole. Don't fool yourselves into thinking that the presence of change today is unique. Change is a fact of life, not a gathering storm. The world was changing 10 years ago, and 10 years before that, and 10 years before that. No surprise that it's changing now, too.

Collaboration: Bill Yontz, then VP of corporate real estate at Capital One, shares some rather prescient ideas in an interview (not available online):

"'I think that in the future—not tomorrow, but certainly in the next 10 years—the essence of work will be collaboration. The collaboration will not just be face-to-face or videoconferencing, but also technology enabled,' he speculates. 'People all located in different places, all working at different times, can input to the same visible product...'"

Mind you, Wikipedia wasn't launched until a year later. So Bill wins the prediction game.

Knowledge: Meanwhile, a short note about the December 1999 ASAE Management and Technology Conference quotes keynoter Larry Prusak, then executive director of the Institute for Knowledge Management: "'If associations can couple their vast stores of data and information with knowledge, they can change some of their economic equations and become true knowledge brokers.'" I think the last 10 years have validated Prusak's vision, though it seems like a lot of associations still struggle with capitalizing on knowledge management today.

There was a lot more in the February 2000 issue of Association Management, of course, but I'll stop here. If you enjoy predictions, though, you should check out "50 Predictions for 50 Years," from the October 1999 issue of Association Management. The first 22 were slated to have happened by now. A few of them are tongue-in-cheek, but the list will definitely get your mind rolling about the past and future of associations. You can also check out the cover story in this month's Associations Now, "Visions for the Future of Associations."