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Maintaining our Technical Progress

6/1/2016

The mission of ACI is to develop and disseminate consensus-based knowledge on concrete and its uses. How does this happen? Here is a brief summary of a very daunting task. ACI is a Standards Developing Organization (SDO), which means we must follow generally accepted consensus guidelines. The Technical Activities Committee (TAC) is the group that manages these consensus guidelines and therefore manages ACI's mission.

Simply put, TAC is the quality control program for the Institute's documents. Ron Burg, ACI Executive Vice President and a past TAC Chair, has said: "TAC manages the process, not the members." TAC's mission is to manage the affairs of the Institute related to technical committee activities, development of ACI standards, oversight of the technical content of convention programs, and archival and special publications of the Institute peer-reviewed articles in periodicals and symposium volumes.

An interesting fact is that ACI's most important document, ACI 318, is actually the law in all 50 states. One could say that TAC oversees the development of law. When your friends and neighbors ask you what you do at ACI, it would be fair to tell them that you are involved in writing laws that are used in all 50 states.

TAC performs its mission with the assistance of more than 120 technical committees. In 1970, there were only 61 technical committees. Chapter 2 of the Technical Committee Manual states that the main purpose of an ACI Technical Committee is to disseminate information through publications and conventions sessions within the scope of the committee mission.

ACI currently has approximately 18,000 members and 3346 of these members are involved with technical committees. This is an increase from 246 committee members in 1970. As you can see, this is a very significant increase over the past 45 years. These committee members come from all segments of our industry: academia, construction, design, manufacturing, owners, specialty consultants, and general interest. It is imperative that these various groups be involved so that no single interest category comprises more than one-third of the membership of a consensus body dealing with safety-related standards. It is also a requirement that no single interest category constitutes a majority of the membership of a consensus body dealing with other than safety-related standards.

As of the end of 2014, ACI technical committees had produced more than 56 standards—of those, four were revised and five were new. These same committees had produced more than 190 reports—of those, 12 were revised and 11 were new. All of these revisions and reports are subject to the ACI consensus process and TAC review.

As an overworked, dedicated voting committee member, YOU are at the heart of this activity. You not only volunteer to provide the critical information from which our documents are generated, but you also wield the awesome power to formally object. While no ACI committee member has veto power, each individual voter has the opportunity to press the pause button and propose a revision or raise an objection that must be considered by the committee.

Do you think a document's current wording is confusing or obsolete? Do you think a proposed change needs revision? Was the original wording more effective? Does the document contain an error? If so, make your point by formally casting a negative vote. You will then be given the opportunity to express your concerns. Your fellow committee members have the responsibility to listen and learn from your comments, and to respond. After multiple viewpoints have been expressed, you might withdraw your negative, agree to defer it to new business, or maintain your position, at which time the question is called and the committee finds out if you have, in fact, been persuasive.

An ACI document is like a building that is constantly under renovation and being improved, enlarged, or made more efficient. Maintaining technical progress as an Institute requires fresh ideas and fresh perspectives. However, testing the validity of those ideas and perspectives is our responsibility as well.

The negative vote, responsibly submitted and effectively handled, is just one of the tools used by our committees to provide the high-quality ACI documents that the industry has come to expect. ACI's tagline is "always advancing" and our technical committees are evidence that we take this charge seriously.

Michael J. Schneider