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Archive for the ‘ITDF’ Category

Several of you have asked where I’ve been this week and what I’ve been doing – so here it is..

On Wednesday I flew down to Southampton (from Newcastle) in the morning to embark on what is now the second Richmond event I’ve attended… the annual IT Director’s Forum.  The journey consisted of the flight and a train ride to Southampton Central station.

Thanks to flight times etc., I ended up with some time to burn and went for a short visit to the West Quays Shopping Centre, nothing to write home about but a pleasant and modern centre with a decent mix of the usual imagination-less chair restaurants, the only exception in my view being Pizza Express who do a pretty good imitation of a real pizza – and that’s where I had lunch.

Looking at the street signs the docks didn’t look that far away so rather than taking the planned shuttle bus as per the previous year, I walked down to the docks. Won’t do that again,the weather was nice but it was quite a hike and I arrived at Dock 10 late afternoon in time to board the Aurora with utterly flattened feet.

Once safely on-board the Aurora (a P&O ship able to handle 1200 passengers – the smallest of the fleet) I attended the opening talk by the proprietor of Richmond events who broke the bad news that the broadband was going to be crap throughout the event.

This was swiftly followed by a keynote speech by Mary Portas who described her experiences and views on everything from the smallest stores struggling to come into the 21st century through to the largest supermarket chains.

Considering that Mary’s website describes her as “the UK’s foremost authority on retail and brand communication, I must say I didn’t entirely agree with everything she said, especially on supermarkets  and didn’t consider her that inspirational but non-the-less she managed to entertain everyone. With all on-board, mid-evening we set off on our journey to the channel Islands which was to take most of the night. Dinner was a casual affair and our hosts were pleasantly un-commercial – we all had a nice time.

Shortly after arriving on the board, I’d met up briefly with Elle who is one of the organisers and it’s really nice that she’s been reading my blog since last year and keeping up with what I’ve been doing so I hope she likes this.

With the ship under way to our destination just a few miles docked off the channel islands, dinner was fine if a little pretentious (“Braised Pave of beef” and other strange titles such as “Baked Tartiflette Potatoes littered the menu) but the important point of course was that the hopeful suppliers paid for the drinks. The night was interesting – I’ve no gripes about my room, balcony view of the sea and sizeable area for a ship, the room was comfortable, the movement in the face of considerable sea-power was not. Everyone commented next morning that the night was “rough”.

So the way this works is simple enough – 3-night cruise, sponsored by sales organisations – IT directors and professionals get the decent rooms around the outside of the ship, the sales people get the inner rooms – they pay, we don’t – simple enough. In return we agree to meet them in short matchmaking sessions in between insightful seminars – obviously they hope we’ll do business and in many cases that works.

All in all though it takes a bit of stamina, a worthwhile two whole days of which I’ve just finished the first. Saturday morning we disembark – I’ll be taking the coach this time to the central train station which is then just one stop to the airport. Should be back by lunchtime Saturday which is great as I’ve some R&D to do before we have friends over for the evening.

Thursday morning we started bright and early, breakfast sponsored in my case by a company called Capita. Breakfast was ok but it’s the one meal of the day I’d rather  have a buffet.  I went on to participate in a discussion on BIG DATA which was more than useful followed by another REALLY interesting discussion on mobile access and security. In each case a facilitator enabled maybe a dozen of us to collaborate and share ideas. 

I facilitated a couple of these discussions the previous year and it was gratifying that some folk remembered me! I then listened to a talk by John Amaechi MBE, a psychologist who is notable by his basketball background and the fact that he stands 6ft 9 inches and 23 stones in weight (and has size 15 shoes) – very interesting as he described the difference between good and bad management.

Lunch was great – I met a couple of people I’m sure to keep in touch with as we have similar interests. After a couple of business meetings in the afternoon, I attended a talk by David Smith – economic editor of the Sunday times who made some predictions for the future and described the on-going effects of the recession – interesting that China is now the leading economy and the entire wealth of the world is steadily moving in that direction.

We had a great session with Clive Panto who put us through some intelligence tests which I have to say my group failed miserably but had a REALLY good laugh in the process (If I tell you that one of the tests was to drop an egg from the ceiling to the ground without breaking it – within 5 minutes we’d broken our first egg and when it came to the presentation of results, which I did – we had the perfect solution, sadly as I was just about to climb the ladders to the ceiling (yes, on a moving ship) the egg fell out of my hands and smashed on the floor which resulted in lots of laughter..

That evening after celebration drinks (as these events have now been going on for 25 years) we had the first of two Black-tie dinners – interesting as I didn’t bring a black tie.

Well, it’s an IT director’s event – I figured open neck might be more the norm – that’s what I get for thinking. I was not however alone by any means.

Friday and more business “dating” meetings, some talks including one about the automation of life and work in the age of smart machines (in which I’m particularly interested of course as someone deeply entrenched in the “Internet of Things”) and the question in one talk was asked “are we innovating ourselves out of the door. The last session of the day was a wine and cheese tasting event, I found time to go soak in the pool, visit a short cheese and wine testing and then the second formal dinner.

Meanwhile I’ve been asked whether I will chair and present at a major Intranet event next year which gives me something to ponder over the next few days.

And that, in a nutshell, is that. Hope you found the blog interesting. And just for that… here’s a picture of some cows I took on the way home and a map showing where the ship was docked for the duration.