As a unified entity, where is the Scheduling Practice headed? Who is leading the charge? Is there a captain on the bridge, at the helm?

Across its remarkable and often tumultuous 50-year history, the Scheduling Practice has evolved without the guidance of any coordinated Master Plan. A bit ironic, don't you think -- given that we're planners? With the smallest of individual steps, the Scheduling Practice has traveled down a long, winding, and sometimes circular route, to where it is today.

• With each new text on some aspects of the Schedule Practice, another self-appointed "authority" arrives on the scene..
• Well-meaning volunteer organizations latch on to random, isolated aspects of the Scheduling Practice and make it their cause. Even if they do their jobs well, their focus is never more than partial. The Big Picture escapes comprehensive overhauling.
• Institutions of higher learning teach not what is new and proven, but instead what they were taught so many years before, thereby guaranteeing ensuring conceptual, if not also intellectual, obsolescence.
• Private sector trainers, mostly aligned with a particular software application, teach the mechanics of automated scheduling under the guise of "How to Create a Schedule." Sadly, students exit these classes with no great understanding of how to pull a schedule together..
• Then there are the occasional inventors, driven by their entrepreneurial spirit, who develop a new methodology and immediately promote it as the latest and greatest thing since Sliced Bread. But are they really better, or even reliable? It is all too common for new methods to be adopted by the Scheduling Community without any empirical evidence that the method really adds value.

The problem is that most researchers lack any real understanding of what is useful, what is esoteric, and what is simply worthless. That is why we conceived of ICS-Research, to act as a go-between. Working with the world's leading universities and think tanks, ICS-Research will administer an ongoing research program designed to generate and provide the Scheduling Practice with reliable, proven, and substantive insights into all aspects of scheduling function and philosophy. Entrusted in ICS-Research will be grant monies donated by corporate benefactors who believe in the ultimate true value of the Scheduling Practice, when properly done.