An Operational and Marketing Infrastructure for the Human Factors and Ergonomics Professions – a Call to Action

. Together, all the people in and associated with our human factors professions have the knowledge, skills, information, processes, resources, and solutions that we need to make our work extremely successful. Through our efforts of enhancing the organization, application, and presentation of these resources, human factors principles can be made a central concept in our culture with all the benefits they will bring to society and our professions. This chapter is dedicated to moving us in this direction. For a number of years I have felt that our human factors profession would benefit from a thorough enterprise analysis to characterize how we currently do business followed by an action program to make improvements. This observation is based on marketplace indications that the products and services that we currently deliver do not always meet the expectations of our customers (those people who ask for human factors support and solutions). In the past, our profession may not have seen the need or benefit of such an analysis or action program, but current events such as the practitioner concerns described later, may indicate that now is the time to take action. Our professional societies, leaders, and practitioners are coming to the realization that we can offer more to society if we can better match our products and services to customer needs. In this chapter, I identify the issues, discuss the increased awareness, and then provide a specific action plan for our future direction. Although this material is initially intended for the ergonomics/human factors practitioner, it will benefit anyone interested in improvement of the ergonomics/human factors discipline.