We all knew something was brewing at Invensys Process Systems when Paulett Eberhart, president and CEO of IPS, silently — and unexpectedly — stepped away from her post last month after two years on the job. No news yet about a permanent replacement, but earlier this week, Invensys CEO Ulf Henriksson sent an internal memo to the IPS group to let everyone know that the company has formed a committee to evaluate the synergies among its IPS, Wonderware, and Eurotherm subsidiaries.

Jeff Greene, president of Eurotherm, will lead the Industrial Automation (IA) integration team, as the committee has been dubbed. The cross-functional executive team has been given marching orders to explore the synergies among the businesses and define the new market opportunity between the automation and the ERP layers.

It’s unclear who exactly is part of this IA committee “dream team,” except for one individual we do know for sure: Sudipta Bhattacharya, president of Wonderware and newly appointed interim COO of the IA business groups (Eurotherm, IPS, and Wonderware).

Bhattacharya will manage the day-to-day operations of the three business groups. Meanwhile, Rashesh Mody, Wonderware’s vice president of marketing, takes over as president of Wonderware on an interim basis, according to the memo, which Jim Pinto posted recently on his blog.

There’s a lot of shuffling going on in the background, but not a lot of substance, it seems. The process, an insider told Managing Automation today, is “still in its formative stages.”

The fact that “interim” is attached to many of the titles means, well, nothing, really. All it says is that Invensys is trying to jockey for a new market position while riding out really bad economic conditions, which is fine, but there needs to be less confusion and more clarity. What all businesses really need right now are strong, not-going-anywhere leaders, not transitory titles.

Invensys has a history of doing this. When Mike Caliel left IPS to lead another company, the company appointed Invensys veteran Ken Brown as “acting” president of IPS. Brown spent seven months in that role, and he put his heart and soul into it — I know, because I sat with him at dinner one evening when he was about four or five months into it, and he told me how he had immersed himself in the IPS business and was working closely with Invensys executives to shift the IPS strategy. He, along with a handful of internal candidates, vied for the job of IPS CEO. Ultimately, it was an outsider — Eberhart — who was given the honors.

I have to say, I thought that was a bum deal for Ken Brown. Personally, I thought he deserved to ditch the “acting” part of his title and carry on with what he had already accomplished.

Eberhart was the choice because of her history of services work with EDS. And that’s understandable. She did a great job of transitioning IPS from a product company to a services company. But now she’s gone.

We reported last month that it was unclear why Eberhart chose to leave IPS, and it’s still not clear. Sources inside IPS say Paulett did not exit the company as a result of this latest internal development, but they gave no other explanation.

A lot of things are not quite clear at this moment in time. If Invensys really wants to reorganize, I say: stop with the juggling and just do it.

—Stephanie Neil, MA Senior Editor