Control is truly global!

By Walt Boyes, Editor in Chief

As I write this, I am preparing to travel to Spain to give a speech at the Honeywell EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) User Group meeting, and from there to Bahrain to give another speech for the Yokogawa EMEA User Group. I’m honored to be asked.

I noticed as I was writing my speeches that there really wasn’t much I needed to change to fit my different audiences, even though they are from completely different parts of the world.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that articles in Control and on ControlGlobal.com have become less and less North America-centric over the past few years. This is intentional, and you can expect the trend to continue.

Process automation professionals are finding that we have much in common with others no matter where in the world we work. An oil field platform in the Gulf of Mexico is controlled much the same way as one off the northern coast of Brazil or one in the South China Sea. Chinese refineries, steel mills and chemical plants are putting in the same kinds of automation plants as North America and Western Europe have – and in some cases, the Chinese or Indian versions are newer and closer to state of the art. In the United States, we are beginning to build a significant number of biomass fuel conversion plants, but as an upcoming article by regular contributor David W. Spitzer will show, the Brazilians have been doing ethanol plants for many years, and North Americans can learn a lot from what has already been done.

Automation professionals also are finding that their job skills are in demand worldwide, not just in the region where they live. We’ve talked a great deal about how difficult it is to find an automation education in North America, and the same thing is true in India, China and other places around the world. Just spend some time on the Automation List, and you’ll see the crying need for automation education worldwide.

We renamed our website to shed light on our global focus, and we’ll continue to globalize ControlGlobal.com’s content. We’ve asked noted British automation journalist, Mike Spear, to come on board as a European contributor, and you’ll be seeing his work several times in the coming year.

You may have noticed the global flavor of Ask the Experts, moderated by process control guru, Béla Lipták. What you may not have noticed is the overwhelmingly international flavor of Control’s electronic edition subscription list.

We welcome all our new friends. They are one of the reasons we offer our facsimile electronic edition in unencrypted HTML and unencrypted PDF. Sometimes it is still easier to download the PDF when the Internet is working and read it offline, or even print it out and take it with you.

As I bring to a close my third year as your editor, I am pretty pleased with what we’ve done to extend our brand on the web and into the blogosphere, while at the same time maintaining the very high standards our predecessors set for us.

But I need your help. We’ll be posting a Readership Survey on ControlGlobal.com this month—and I would be very pleased and honored if you would share some of your valuable time with us to fill it out. We need to know what you think and what you’d like us to do next to make Control more valuable to you as a process automation professional.