PlantSuccess Newsletter
Volume III, Issue 11
21 May 2003
Dear Subscriber:
PlantSuccess
is the product of numerous tradeshows, conferences, user group meetings, etc that
I have attended over 25+ years. The inaugural event was held at Philadelphia’s Warwick
Hotel in September 1999; PlantSuccess was immediately seen to be different because
of:
These were pretty
heady days; conferences and such were too numerous to count. Two years later, terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon changed everything; the misguided
bubble of the dot.com phenomenon had already burst. Despite no shortage of challenges
-- a lackluster economy and widespread travel bans in this market are significant;
there are major opportunities as well.
PlantSuccess
has recruited more than 100 speakers from industry leaders and, in a short period
of time, has built an enviable reputation for outstanding content. We are part of
the solution and on the right side of this equation with great plans for the future.
PlantSuccess
Northeast 2003 is scheduled
15-16 October at the PHL Airport Marriott. Jim Porter, DuPont’s Chief Engineer
and VP of engineering and operations, keynoter for the inaugural event, will
return as keynoter for our 5th annual fall event in the Philadelphia
area. You will be learning more about other speakers soon.
Scores of conferences
have been cancelled or postponed over the past couple of years and many of the organizers
are out of business or headed that way. Like everyone else, we don’t go to as many
conferences as we used to. However, we attended COFES (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software)
2003 recently and enjoyed the Scottsdale venue and fellowship with senior
managers averaging many years in the software business.
AVEVA, a regular and valued sponsor of PlantSuccess,
rotates its annual user conference, ISEIT,
between North America, Europe and Asia; this year’s event is mid-June in Houston
– we’ll be there.
Ken Eickmann, now in his 6th year as director
of the Construction Industry Institute
(CII) has been a great contributor to PlantSuccess 2000 and PlantSuccess
Gulf Coast 2003. When I can, I enjoy CII’s annual conference and am glad that this
year’s event, the end of July, is in Orlando.
We hope an improving
economy will make it easier for more managers from the process industry to participate
in conferences like PlantSuccess. We believe there is an incredible amount of information
regarding successful implementations that can be shared and will enhance the position
of the presenter and contribute to the recipients. We love to hear from interested
personnel with presentation ideas for PlantSuccess – either Philadelphia in the
fall or Houston in the spring.
Visit www.PlantSuccess.com to review and/or download
presentations of interest to you from any of the PlantSuccess conferences. Plan
on joining us for this year’s anniversary event at the PHL Airport Marriott.
Best regards,
Carl Howk, Chairman
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Current Links
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An article with
this title in most publications will draw attention, particularly so if published
in the May 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review and written by editor-at-large
Nicolas Carr. The article can be downloaded for a small fee at Harvard Business
Online.
Bob Evans,
editor of InformationWeek.com and one of my favorites, wrote in his Between
The Lines column of 13 May, “… the article
is intent on proving the thesis that because IT has become widespread, then it must
perforce become a commodity, as happened to other one-time breakthrough and industry-jarring
innovations, such as steam engines and railroads, telephones and telegraphs, electric
generators and internal-combustion engines. And Carr's unshakable belief in that
inevitability leads him to a conclusion that's no doubt provocative, which I think
was his primary intent, but also profoundly shortsighted and dangerous.”
This article probably generated as much response as anything
he has written and, in his Between
The Lines column of 19 May, Evans chose to share remarks from Ralph Szygenda,
CIO of General Motors, who wrote, Nicholas Carr may ultimately be correct when
he says IT doesn't matter. Business-process improvement, competitive advantage,
optimization, and business success do matter and they aren't commodities. To facilitate
these business changes, IT can be considered a differentiator or a necessary evil.
But today, it's a must in a real-time corporation."
Szygenda added,
"Yes, IT has aspects of commoditization. PCs, telecommunications, software
components such as payroll, benefit programs, business-process outsourcing, and
maybe even operating systems and database-management systems are examples. But the
application of information systems in a corporation's product design, development,
distribution, customer understanding, and cost-effective Internet services is probably
at the fifth-grade level."
"The gut-wrenching
declines in CEO confidence that we have witnessed in recent months are over- and
over with a bang. Our CEO Index soared 20.4 points- the most abrupt shift this indicator
has ever experienced- to 109.8," reports Chief Executive Magazine.
This good news
is the product of a survey begun with September 2002. Chief Executive's CEO Confidence
Index electronically surveys 3,000 CEO's monthly of which approximately 500 respond.
The survey gathers their current and future opinions of certain key measures of
business activity. Similar to other indices, answers to 6 questions, 3 representing
current or present conditions, and 3 representing future expectations, are collected
and then analyzed to determine a series of statistics that provide insight into
current and future expectations of economic activity by CEO's. 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 III, Issue 11 Newsletter articles: