Planning For IEEE Standards Association Corporate Membership

With the 2011 Corporate budget planning cycle about to begin in many companies, I thought it appropriate to review the IEEE Standards Association (SA) Corporate membership plan, including both its costs and benefits.  This will allow companies that feel that SA membership is beneficial for them to put the membership dues in their 2011 budgets.

The IEEE, as almost all of you will know, is the body under which numerous standards are developed.  These include not only such familiar EDA-related standards as SystemVerilog, SystemC, VHDL, PSL, IP-XACT, UPF, JTAG and e, but also somewhat lesser known (but certainly not of lesser importance to their users) standards like Rosetta and Esterel.  What you may not realize is that the IEEE SA has in recent years begun to emphasize its Corporate membership program.  Under this program, more IEEE working groups (WGs) are being organized as “entity-based”, i.e., are being set up as composed of members that are “entities” (corporations, non-profit organizations, consulting firms and so forth) as opposed to being a group of individual experts.

Such entity-based WGs have the distinct advantage that the influence of a member is not a function of its size and/or the number of individuals it can send to a meeting. Specifically, in an entity-based WG a very large company, a non-profit standards support organization and a small consulting firm will each have the same number of votes —one— on any issue.  Not all IEEE WGs are entity-based, although most of the EDA standards that are sponsored by the Design Automation Standards Committee (DASC) are.  However, the trend inside of the IEEE SA seems to be heading in the direction of such entity-based standards WGs.

To facilitate this movement, the SA has instituted a two-level Corporate membership structure: “Basic” and “Advanced” Corporate memberships in the SA are available.  The details and benefits of the various levels of membership are explained in detail on the SA’s website. However, most relevant to this article, the two levels of membership determine the extent and manner in which a member may participate in the meetings of entity-based WGs.  Advanced Corporate members may fully participate for no additional dues in any entity-based WG—“full participation” meaning (among other things) the ability to make proposals and technical contributions, serve as officers of the WG, vote on motions and so forth.  Basic Corporate SA members, on the other hand, may join an unlimited number of entity-based WG as an observer for no additional dues.   Non-SA members may attend a single entity-based WG meeting, but only as observer—presumably to get enough information to decide whether to join the SA.

The cost of such corporate memberships might have become a sticking point if handled badly.  Indeed, it would have undermined the above-mentioned advantage of leveling the playing field inside of an entity-based WG if each prospective member had to pay the same amount of membership dues.  Simply put, what might be a small fee for a large company could easily be prohibitive to a small consulting firm.  To mitigate this potential problem, the SA put its annual corporate dues on a sliding scale based on revenue.  Yes, there is still a cost to join, and some pain associated with the dues–  especially in the current down economy.  However, for those organizations to whom standardizing technology is critical, the sliding scale attempts to turn these dues into an affordable “cost of doing business”.

The sliding scale for IEEE SA Corporate membership dues is located at the bottom of the same web page on which they give information about the membership levels.

This is where you, the readers, are given an action item.  If you have read this far, then you likely have an interest in EDA standards.  That being the case, it may very well make sense for you to work to get the proper level of SA Corporate dues into your organization’s 2011 budget.  Depending on your organization’s financial situation, Basic Corporate membership may be the only viable option, but such membership will still have the distinct advantage of allowing members of your organization to observe at WG meeting, thereby giving you early information about upcoming Standards.  Of course, the Advanced Corporate membership option looks to be an even better choice, since such a membership level will allow your organization’s voice to be fully heard.  In either case, the worse choice will be to do nothing,  and discover next year that you are not eligible to attend or participate in an IEEE WG of high importance to your organization.  This will force you to either sit on the sidelines, or go back and try to find the relevant monies for dues in an already set (and often very tight) budget.