While Early Bird Registration for the October 12-16 Emerson Exchange Conference in Denver remains open, let’s highlight a few more presentations from the conference.
Emerson’s Nikki Bishop is teaming with Shell’s Sara Hough on a presentation, Closing the Gap: Leveraging the Power of Diversity in a Technical World. Their abstract:
One only needs to look around a meeting room or the conference floor to know that there is a significant diversity gap in the automation industry. A diverse workforce that is reflective of society as a whole is beneficial to teamwork and to the company bottom line. Don’t believe it? We will share studies that show that diverse teams perform better over time and the role of unconscious bias in working against developing and retaining that diversity. You will walk away with tools to make a difference in your teams whether you are an individual contributor or a hiring manager.
As we look to replace many experienced people reaching retirement age, having people from many cultures and backgrounds will be important in filling this gap. Check out the Emerson “We Love STEM” page for other ways promotion of science, technology, engineering and math to future generations of engineers is occurring.
Nikki is also teaming with Emerson’s Barbara Hamilton on a presentation, What Can Process Control Loops Teach Us About Emotional Intelligence? Lots! Their abstract:
The world of automation is rich in brilliant engineers with high intelligence quotients, or IQ’s. But what is the secret of star performers? The answer is their high emotional quotient, or EQ. Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in positive ways to communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict.
In this session, we will teach you how to develop and strengthen your emotional intelligence using trusted concepts from process control, like sensing, feedback and final control.
Emerson’s Ben Bishop will present, The VPN is Dead: Cloud Based Information Sharing and Analytics. His abstract:
Traditionally vendors have supported customers by tunneling into the customer infrastructure. This methodology has come under increased scrutiny as customers look to reduce the attack surface for cybercriminals. As direct information portals into customer systems are closed, paradoxically customer demand for remote monitoring, analytics, and support are increasing. A new paradigm must be created that allows subsets of information to flow securely outside of the customer enterprise architecture.
He notes that this workshop is about how customers will share data/information differently in the future.
Currently, if a process manufacturer or producer wants a supplier to remotely monitor and support them, or wants to share data with a business partner, they must create a secure communication tunnel between the two businesses. This tunnel, a virtual private network (VPN) requires negotiations between the information technology departments and can be complex to implement. Often it involves a connection to the process control network layer, or very near to it.
These manufacturers and producers are fearful of cyberattacks, so they are looking to “close the doors and bar the windows”, closing off all external data connections. Sometimes, they don’t even allow information inside their own networks to flow all the way down to the process control layer. If they are closing the traditional methods of accessing data for remote monitoring and analytics, but have a need for more supplier support as they face expertise shortages, then how do they accomplish this?
One answer might be to architect software to “push” data up to higher-level networks closer to the internet. Once the data is at the higher-level network inside the customer’s systems, they need to push it out to the vendor for analysis. This Internet “push” could be done using OSIsoft’s PI Cloud Connect. PI Cloud Connect creates two outbound connections (one from the manufacturer, the other from the vendor supplying remote analytics) and those two connections meet on the Internet in the “cloud”. The “cloud” means that the consumers of the service, in this case customer and vendor, don’t care where the connection broker is housed.
Ben will share data from the University of Texas at Austin’s Pickle Research Center across the cloud to the Austin iOps Center using this methodology.
Register to join us in Denver and make sure to join your peers all year round in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.
