Chairman’s Report 2007/8
I would like to start by
thanking Staffordshire University for hosting this event and for
providing the venue for our meetings. The link with Staffordshire
University is very fruitful for both sides as we get support from the
university with the rooms and in exchange the branch supports several
student prizes, sponsorship of GRADEX, the student graduate exhibition
and access to our mailing list for some of their events which could be
of interest to our members.
We used the same format as
last year with the 2 sites for meetings being Staffordshire University’s
2 campuses, Ashley Building, Leek Road for our northern meetings and The
Octagon Building at Beaconside for our southern meetings. For the first
time this year we started holding our northern area committee meetings
in the Brindley Building.
In September we held a
subsidised meal for members and partners. I was amazed how few people
came to this, we have 900 members in the area now and 20 came and
enjoyed a pleasant evening in the The Gables at Trentham. There was a 2
for 1 offer on that night so we found that the members paid nothing,
that was a real bonus.
October saw a meeting about
the Enigma machine and the code breaking that occurred during World War
2 we now know that this was the origins of the first computer called
COLLOSUS which was built in Bletchley Park. This was a fascinating
meeting with the largest ever attendance at a branch meeting for many
years (160 turned up and we made the Sentinel Front Page)
November was by David Supple
of ECOTEC who talked about the problems that a very large SME has with
IT as it falls between small business systems and corporate systems.
David offered some useful advice for other companies in a similar
position
December was our regular visit
to Yarnfield with a joint meeting with IET and The Communications
Network. This year the topic was Professor Phil Green talking about
Digital Speech Synthesis and its uses in helping people with speech
defects. This really was leading edge work and future applications are
tremendous.
In the New Year we started
with a talk by Tony Proctor on WARP, a government backed scheme to
monitor and detect security breaches and a reporting system to pass on
this information to industry.
In February we tried another
joint meeting with another professional body, the Chartered Management
Institute, and Dr Alan Eardley who specialises in Business IT strategy
gave an interesting talk on knowledge management and how IT can help
managers in companies retain specialist knowledge.
March we had our annual
Student Presentations Evening with disappointingly only 3 fascinating
and very diverse presentations by some excellent students. The topics
covered knowledge management, automatic picture conversion software and
intelligent fridges.
April finished the season with
an interesting look at the latest trends in networking by Chris Howard
the head of CISCO training at Staffordshire University and how video
conferencing could take on a whole new light.
It was originally our
intention to run an Autumn Course but due to various reasons and
difficult negotiations we had to make it a Spring Course on Security in
the Workplace. The course was very well received but unfortunately not
that well attended with only 6 members coming. I believe we have learnt
a valuable lesson and in future we should always keep our price below
£100.
Numbers at our events are
never high with 15 to 20 being normal. However many of the faces at
Stoke meetings are different to the faces at the Stafford events and the
October meeting had more attendees than all the others put together.
Finally can I thank the
committee who have worked hard this year to bring us this programme.
G. I. Sunley,
Branch Chairman
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