Earlier this week, I was invited to present at one of the technical sessions for the upcoming ISA expo 2007. This particular session's focus, was on "NEW SIS hardware technology". Initially, I was asked to represent Siemens and to describe their state-of-the-art technology employeed on its safety design that just so happens to be very unique and quite possibly controversial....hmmh...So I guess folks want to learn more about advancements in safety technology, and of course I was happy to share.

When I responded with my interest, I was immediately notified by Mr. Paul Gruhn, (ISA 2007 Expo Safety & Security Co-Chair) that they really weren’t looking for me to present, rather for an end user, who could discuss the benefits of this technology. I responded to Paul (and the rest of the committee) that would be like having him present on his PC's benefit with say a Pentium chip, rather than an AMD chip. I said "I doubt you’d know the difference".

Paul did apologize for ruffling my feathers (and yes, we are still very good friends), but admitted what they really had in mind was some description of the overall user benefit of deploying this new fangled technology (i.e. keep it non-commercial).  Unfortunately, if it were only that easy...Other than the obvious, most can't even realize (nor understand) the benefit of staying with a legacy platfom, unless maybe we see a startling ad with barbwire and official looking government seals on it is convincing enough... (I'm sure some of you will know what I'm talking about here) ;-)

I told the committee, that while I did appreciate all of the volunteer work they are doing, let’s face it, attendance at the Fall expo has gotten so bad, engineers are having a hard time getting permission to even go. To top that off, most technical sessions, are just plain boring. We need to pump some energy and excitement into that sea of blank stares, yawning faces. I applauded when Mr. Ed Marszal (President of Kenexis) interjected with "yeah, we want to avoid a situation where we have consultants give their tenth presentation in a row on HIPPS where the content has not changed for six years". Thanks Ed, that’s definitely a move in the right direction.

I guess I’m just curious, what do people want to hear at the ISA expo, and who do you want to hear it from? Let me know, I'm curious along with many others....!