Monday 23 February 2009

Of Commerce & the Credit Crunch

Socitm’s Commercial Board met today. Its terms of reference will be published, this week, in the Members’ area of the website, but we agreed that minutes of meetings will not be published. Although we are absolutely committed to the greatest possible transparency in the conduct of the Society’s business, I’m sure you can appreciate that, by its very nature, much of the Commercial Board’s business is bound to be commercially sensitive. Nevertheless, I’ll continue to provide high level reports here.

We discussed a number of aspects of the Socitm Insight Service. Negotiation of the contractual relationship and a performance management regime are at an advanced stage. Martin tabled a short paper concerning the need to review the strategic direction of the service over the next few years, and we’ve agreed to work on this ahead of the next meeting.

A particular discussion point concerned the development of the Supplier Index, and we saw opportunities to link to Government procurement initiatives and build closer links with the RIEPs. There’ll be a workshop to develop this particular development.

Socitm Insight is arranging forums in London (8th April) and Manchester (19th April) to consider IT’s role and response to the credit crunch. The morning will be for suppliers and the afternoon for public sector members.

We also considered a proposal from Elaine, which resulted from the recent meeting with Adrian and I. As I mentioned, last week, this focuses on “quick fixes”. The meeting was supportive, and agreed the proposal subject to a couple of issues of detail, which Adrian was empowered to conclude.

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