Benefits to R&D Managers and Executives:

Key benefits to R&D Executives include achieving R&D goals by enhancing the creative process.  Your membership in CENSA will help your organization to:

  Reduce the "corporate amnesia" so prevalent in large organizations, where only "work artifacts" are captured.  This is the organizational equivalent of "repeating the experiment."  Work artifacts are only project deliverables, documents and reports, not the entire process, context, or decisions that led up to specific results.  Today people leave companies -- what they learned is systematically lost -- resulting in redoing design, decisions, and processes.  "Reinventing the wheel" is very costly!

  Focus the company's internal IS projects more on core, company-specific goals for scientific software rather than on what should be generic "off-the-shelf" applications, enabling technologies, base platforms, middleware, clients modules, and integration toolkits needed by many companies.

  Receive a foundation vision and strategies that have been validated by dozens of companies worldwide. This will enhance your own vision, make it easier to achieve, and provide you with benchmarks against which to measure peers in your own organization or competitors in other organizations. Missing some critical pieces of this foundation or simple, but not so obvious, strategies can be far more costly than the price of a fraction of a person-year you will invest in CENSA.

  Produce R&D-targeted intelligent business integration frameworks that more easily solve problems. Technology-savvy executives tell us they need an extensible and reusable (i.e., component-based) infrastructure, that is more flexible and reconfigurable.

  Reduce your costs, fix your infrastructure, and increase your momentum in the new automation technologies of integrated R&D enterprise informatics -- collaborative electronic notebook systems, enterprise electronic records management and archival systems, content warehousing and retrieval systems, intelligent collaborative problem solving environments, and advanced knowledge management for portfolio tracking, advanced decision support, and pipeline optimization.

  Provide tools and a better infrastructure to accelerate the movement to "the culture of teams," and then the improved support of local teams and virtual distributed teams.