A new audience at Emerson's User Exchange

The Emerson Global Users Exchange will be wrapping up shortly. I was there in Orlando earlier in the week for the opening and big press announcements. (Those announcements will be covered in our normal news section and via newsletters.) Compared to the 2008 meeting in Washington DC, this one was somewhat more restrained, which is understandable given how this past year has been. Attendance was down from the 2008 record of 2,579, with chairman Christoph Lebl reporting that over 1,600 were in attendance this week. Other companies have been reporting similar declines at their user events. When he asked the collected attendees how many were there for the first time, quite a few hands went up in the air. It wasn’t practical to start counting, but assuming that roughly half the people in the room were end users, I’d wager that easily half of those were first timers. This is consistent with results reported at Honeywell Process Solutions’ meeting last June. HPS reckoned that more companies were represented than usual, but sent fewer individuals, and fewer companies sent people for repeat visits.

This demographic change seems to be in line with the general belief that there are fewer people working in process plants that have extensive training and experience. The skills gap is alive and well, and the recession has only made it worse as companies have lost experienced people to retirement and outright layoffs. Emerson made this point a number of times and says that it is building its products with a new generation of minimally trained operators in mind. Human knowledge and experience will have to be replaced by more sophisticated automation. The plant expert who knows how everything works will have to be embedded into the software.

That brings up some interesting points for user group steering committees as they consider the nature of programming for such events. (The same applies to magazines in this space.) The basic assumptions about who’s in the audience and what those people need will certainly have to evolve. With more people looking for basic information, the kind of reference library that online archives provide combined with discussion groups facilitated by social media will take on ever increasing importance.