Thursday 22nd May

There was full attendance for today's board meeting, with a really packed agenda. David Houston, attended on behalf of the affiliates, to report upon the work undertaken on our behalf, and offer advice on fiscal development. Melanie, who looks after our finances was also in attendance and will attend all meetings as financial adviser, together with Pam, as Secretary and advisor on company matters.

The minutes of the meeting will be published in the membership area of Socitm's web-site, when agreed. In the meantime, some of the decisions that I thought noteworthy were:

• We will ensure full attribution of costs for all services to ensure we have a proper picture of revenue contribution (radical stuff, eh!), but any profits are for the benefit of the wider society – not ring-fenced.
• We agreed the "policy" on Socitm policy development, which includes a 30 day period of member consultation / feedback, and this, will now be published via the web-site.
  Initial policy proposals will focus on Information Sharing, Security & Trust, Convergence Vision, Customer Data Integration & Green IT.
• We will finalise the work on a new membership model, undertaken by the Member Services Group, and publish that to the membership, as soon as possible, for consultation and feedback, with an invitation to organisations to pilot new arrangements.
• The National Advisory Council will be established as a matter of priority. Initially this will be based-upon representation from each Socitm region, but we will invite the nomination of representatives from different parts of the public sector, and with different specialisms.
• We agreed an excellent suggestion from Steve Palmer – to ask each Graham Williamson Challenge award winner to serve as an adviser to the board in the year following his or her travel year.
• The new Consulting contract principles were agreed and the board delegated finalisation of the arrangements to enable the new terms to be implemented from 1st June.
• We agreed to explore extending similar operating principles to our other main commercial service – Socitm Insight.

A host of other priorities were agreed in areas like Vision, Values, Strategy and Ethics, and our approach to private sector partnership. Concerning the latter, the board delegated short-term, tactical, arrangements, and requested a paper on a strategy for the whole Society, rather than the piecemeal approach that has largely operated in the past. Criteria for invitations to the annual President's Dinner, which we need to send pretty soon for this year's event, in September, were finalised.

In the evening I went along to a consultation on the future of the CW500 Club. I thought there may be some insights to be had on member requirements that could apply in Socitm!