Control Engineering

Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

Off to the user groups
May 30, 2007

It's almost June, and in two weeks I will be in Phoenix at the Honeywell User Group. This begins a season of gatherings that will continue through the rest of the year as Control Engineering editors fan out to attend what seems to be an ever growing roster of company meetings around the country and the world. Some of my colleagues will be attending one for Siemens during the same week.

Actually, it's difficult to define a season since groups meet virtually year 'round. There does seem to be a larger number in the late summer and fall though. Invensys has announced that they intend to split theirs up and have four more specialized gatherings in 2007 rather than just one.

Yesterday I was talking to one of the Honeywell folks about planning my trip, and she mentioned that it wasn't long ago that editors were intentionally not invited to that event, and that sentiment applied to many other user groups as well. The conventional wisdom at that point was that end users didn't want us lurking in the shadows eager to gather information that would be, presumably, either valuable to competitors or somehow embarrassing. Generally those of us in the press are clearly identified for your safety, and organizers like to keep an eye on us. The locating collars do get a bit uncomfortable, but we get used to it.

We attend these functions for the same reasons you do. We want to know what's going on in the real world. It's difficult for us to get out to actual end user sites very often, so we have to gather information as we can, and user groups are a good place to do it. If you are at a user group and you see me, please say hello. Feel free to offer comments, good and bad, about what you think we're doing. That's how we improve our product.

Posted by Peter Welander on May 30, 2007 | Comments (0)