A Hectic Three Weeks...

Today’s Socitm Board Meeting, at Camden Town Hall, was my last as President and Chair.
As always, the minutes will be published in due course, but some noteworthy items were:

· A revised base budget for 2009 was agreed, which provides for some investment from reserves to fully cover financial implications of expenditure agreed in resourcing policy and commercial development requirements.
· Adrian, David and I will be attending a Socitm Consulting Conference, at the beginning of next week, to get to know the Team, discuss further development of the business and share our plans, hopes and aspirations for the Society.
· Adrian presented a paper proposing organisational changes to support commercial and business development. This involved utilising Socitm Services Limited (SSL) which Socitm still owns but has been inactive, for all trading activities. SSL, as a company limited by shares, is the appropriate body for commercial developments, whilst membership services should continue to reside in Socitm Limited, which is limited by guarantee. We agreed that the Commercial Board should further develop the proposition.
· We also discussed the status of discussions on business partnerships. We agreed that we now have a good understanding of the ways in which we should work with business partners and that there is strong interest from a number of businesses in entering partnerships. The main concern, ‘though, was in ensuring that we are able to resource effective account management and ensure that we fully deliver the outcomes we commit to - a “chicken and egg” situation. We agreed to finance some additional work to develop that capability and generate the confidence to enter partnership opportunities as soon as possible.
· We also discussed our structure and branding to facilitate the different sectoral focuses that are evolving within Socitm, and the suggestion that there should be a “parent company” with sector-specific subsidiaries covering CITRA, web management etc. It was agreed that Adrian and I would develop the proposition, consulting Vicky on branding considerations (one of which is our transition to the .net domain).
· Sadly, the CMS development has further slipped, and I definitely won’t be able to present the “look and feel” at next week’s AGM, as I had hoped to! We agreed action to ensure the development is fully completed ahead of the annual conference, when we also aim to have completed structural proposals to support membership and professional development, which the CMS will be needed to support.
· There were a number of actions to be taken forward through a number of key meetings that are scheduled in the next three weeks – meeting of the National Advisory Council, the Membership and Commercial Boards and, of course, next week’s conference and AGM.