A teacher and guide in spiritual and philosophical matters. Some of my remarks, I hope, contained an idea or two that would help members of the audience to answer the other questions for themselves. I wish I would have had the foresight to discuss the issue further with the maintenance manager who made the guru comment. From his tone, I assumed he equated guru to an expert with an attitude. There are a number of functions or roles in an effective condition monitoring or predictive maintenance program.
Guru is just one.
Others that come to mind are champion, user, analyst, and field technician. The field technician makes the inspections and collects the data and samples to be studied by the analyst, who makes recommendations to the user, who will cause the maintenance organization to take appropriate action on the information. The champion is the person who may have introduced the concept and currently supports it with enough strength to keep it going. The participants knowledge is derived from the teacher, expert, or guru. These functions may be fulfilled by a team or a single person, by in-house personnel or an outside service organization, but they must be fulfilled and be part of a rational process if condition monitoring is to be successful.