I've been privately advised that there are people in ISA's management, both staff and volunteer, who are very upset at me for taking what they see as "shots" at ISA. Frankly, they can be as upset as they want.
The day I stop arguing for a better ISA, one that better serves its members, and its stakeholders, is the day I finally come to the conclusion that the organization is dead.
It does ISA little good to continue to fudge the numbers and pretend that things are better than they are.
The idea of an overall alliance between organizations devoted to automation is a good one. Should it be a wholly owned subsidiary of ISA? Only if ISA can show that they can manage it for the betterment of all the other organizations in the alliance. Maybe ISA should just be a part of it, instead of owning it. Maybe, since ISA has all that money sitting away, they might just agree to give it seed funding and see if it will fly on its own?
As long as people within ISA believe that criticism of ISA is unpatriotic, nothing will ever change.
Let's not lose sight of the real issue, folks. There are 400,000 odd automation professionals worldwide, and somehow, ISA has managed to miss presenting a compelling value proposition to 375,000 of them.
You can say what you want, but until that changes, ISA is not providing a valuable enough proposition to even consider becoming just the process automation part of that umbrella organization, let alone the owner of "automation inc."
