Promoting the Business of the FMGM Community

The publicity for this symposium indicates that papers for Theme 3, "The Business Side of Instrumentation", should address this topic by demonstrating and quantifying the benefits of field performance monitoring to owners, project management teams, engineers, construction contractors, regulators and insurers. This paper takes a different view of the business side of instrumentation. After a brief reference to some of the benefits, the paper focuses on the following question: How do we in the FMGM (Field Measurements in Geomechanics) community do a better job of promoting our business of manufacturing and providing field services? This paper reviews the current FMGM organization and some views expressed at previous FMGM symposia. Following this introduction we have tried to put forward some ideas that we can follow individually for promoting the business of the FMGM community. Because the quality of our work impacts on our future business, in appropriate sections we have described and referenced various publications that are intended to guide us in maximizing the quality of what we do.