News

September 2007

Sorry this month’s news is so late. When Melinda said “Where is the September News, Ian?” I said, “I have just done that and posted it, didn’t I?” No, another senior moment! Good job Melinda, we are glad we have her to keep us straight! I managed to talk to John Moscatelli and he is doing well and tells me both Beth and Tess are well and enjoying him being at home.

First of all, I want to thank all the people who showed interest in last month’s article on Shift Handover. I have received many emails and phones calls and I am pleased to tell you that we have a great solution and we have partners with software tools to help during shift handover.

This last month, I had an e-meet (is that a word?) with a wonderful young lady in the UK who is doing a PhD in Computer Science (University College London), focused on the performance issues with CCTV in control rooms. What a wonderful research area again stressing that we keep designing for Poor Situation Awareness and we do not allow for the human limitations. I am sure her research is going to bear much fruit for those in security. She found UCDS by reading one of our articles on the web, what a wonderful invention the web is.

UCDS has been doing Security Control Room Assessments in New York for another large Pharmaceutical Company. Dave and I enjoyed the hospitality of a great customer in their executive hospitality suite, nice. Beats hotels anytime! Reminds me of those wonderful days at ICI and their special brand of guest houses they used have.

I want to thank the folks at Putman Media Publishing for being great hosts and allowing me to give the Keynote address at their AutomationXchange meeting in Salt Lake City. Have you noticed where ever you go and present a paper Walt Boyes is always in the wings capturing every piece of news? No wonder his article are so good, he really does a great job. Well done Walt. Copies of the presentation are available on request.

I also had the privilege of visiting our friends at Calgon Carbon in Kentucky. It is great to see small companies stretching themselves and beating the big boys. They attack best practices like hungry sharks and are not afraid to provide solutions out of the box.

My last trip was into Canada to do some workshops for a Pulp & Paper company on Situation Management. This was my first time into BC - what a nice State and the Vancouver Airport must be the nicest and most friendly in Canada. It was a pleasure to travel through there.

In August, I had two new articles published in Control Magazine: