PlantSuccess Newsletter
Volume III, Issue 1
8 January 2003
Dear Subscriber:
Although the door on last year is closed, there doesn’t seem to be much change in 2003 – yet. I believe this will be a year of change and great opportunity for all of us. PlantSuccess will contribute to these changes. The presentations and discussions at PlantSuccess conferences (available at http://www.plantsuccess.com/) always generate optimism and enthusiasm; it’s in the nature of the innovative managers we recruit from leaders in the process industry and because we’re addressing the successful implementation of technologies important to improved plant performance, competitiveness and profitability.
These presentations also portend the future – the successful choices of the past will continue to satisfy business drivers in the future. Managing change and balancing the impact of new technology on people and work processes will continue to be a challenge. We need to continue to present our own success and to learn from the success or others; PlantSuccess will continue to lead with these efforts.
Saddam Hussein soon will be relegated to history, an unfortunate character in a string of despots. So long as the US is a tower of freedom and strength, there will be people in the world who will want to take us down. As demonstrated many times, the people of the US and its economy has always risen to the challenge; we will continue to prevail, our economy will continue to prosper and grow at an improved rate.
There is no shortage of forecasts available from economists and soothsayers; we will continue to share the views of some of them with our readers.
The holidays are behind us and I believe all of us are doing everything we can to make this year better than last year. PlantSuccess Gulf Coast 2003, 9-10 April at the Hilton Houston NASA Clear Lake, is our focus. We will have a great conference, led by keynoter Doug Walker, an executive with ExxonMobil, recently retired after an illustrious career of 34 years. Visit http://www.plantsuccess.com/ to learn more about Doug and for the latest on the next PlantSuccess conference.
Carl Howk, Chairman
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The Aberdeen Group (Boston) provides market analysis and positioning services for business technology and is one of many prognosticators.
Following several quarters of negative or anemic growth, Aberdeen does not see a return to double-digit annual growth rates of the late 1990s. Rather, they forecast a more sustainable growth rate of about 4 percent to 5 percent annually through 2006.
Among Aberdeen's findings:
· The factors contributing to excessive growth in the late 1990's are not repeatable. These elements included corporate retooling around Y2K issues, the Internet/e-Commerce euphoria phenomenon, excessive venture capital investment in dot coms, traditional enterprises accelerating e-business deployments to match the dot.com threat, and unsustainable IT spending in the telecom sector.
- Long-term IT spending is gated by GDP growth and corporate revenue growth. IT spending now accounts for 3.88 percent of the world GDP and 4.42 percent of the U.S. GDP.
- China's importance will dramatically increase. Aberdeen expects that China will vault from the sixth largest market for IT products and services in 2002 to the third largest market by 2006, surpassing the Germany, U.K., France and Italy.
- Software and services spending gain at the expense of hardware. Worldwide hardware expenditures will increase a total of only 8.3 percent from 2002 to 2006, while software and services will increase 27.2 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively, over the same time period.
This forecast also covers areas of interest to readers including: enterprise business integration, data storage, enterprise Linux, outsourcing, identity theft and supply chain management. READ MORE.
According to a study conducted in the fall of 2002 by Info-Tech Research Group, US companies are the most innovative and competitive, partly because they make better use of technology. Thirty percent of Americans reported that technology is used as a "strategic weapon" within their organization, compared to 17 percent of UK and six percent of Canadian respondents.
Analyst Jason Livingstone reports: "It starts from the top down. Support from senior management is the most important factor in strategic utilization of information technology within an organization. Corporate culture revolves around the attitudes of senior management. If they don't recognize technology as a significant contributor, it shows in the competitiveness of the firm."
No surprise here. This is why we recruit the speakers we do for PlantSuccess. READ MORE.
According to the report, Albert Einstein (1879-1955), who formulated basic theories about space, time and relativity, had assumed that gravity moved with the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second.
Researchers used 10 radio telescopes scattered across the Earth from Hawaii to Germany to precisely measure how light from a distant quasar, a type of star, was bent as it passed by Jupiter on its way to the Earth. Jupiter is in the precise position for such a measurement only once a decade. To make the measurement, the instruments had to detect a minute deflection of the light – comparable to measuring the size of a silver dollar sitting on the moon's surface, or measuring the width of a human hair from 250 miles away. READ MORE.
The PlantSuccess Newsletter generates a substantial number of visits to our website, we welcome the interest and the access to previous issues of the Newsletter which are available there. If you'd like to share this newsletter with a colleague, just forward a copy. Subscribe or cancel by sending a request to Carl.Howk@PlantSuccess.com
Full links to Volume II, Issue 28 Newsletter articles: