Branch Chairman's Letter - Session 2007 - 2008

September 2007

Dear Branch Member,

Welcome to the 2007-8 season

I have pleasure in enclosing the Hertfordshire Branch Programme for 2007-8.

The purpose of the BCS as a whole is to raise awareness of the profession and establishing the value of its professional qualifications. At least one purpose of the Branch is help its members maintain and extend their knowledge.   We aim to present well-informed speakers discoursing on diverse topics of current interest.   There should be something for everyone, no matter what their professional focus.   Attendance at all Hertfordshire Branch talks qualifies as Continuing Professional Development and certificates are available from the committee at the end of each meeting.

The branch is also a route through which you can communicate with and influence the corporate BCS.   Representatives from the committee usually attend the biannual Branches Congress, held at the London office in April and October, where we have the opportunity to meet people from HQ and from other branches across the country.   Congress elects members to the Branches Management Committee, which oversees branch activities.   If you have ideas that you feel should be passed to the BMC, please get in touch with me, or with Mike Barwise, our Congress representative.

From time to time questions arise about the role of the BCS in helping members find jobs.   To be a recruitment agent per se is beyond the Society's brief, so it has an arrangement with Monster.com, as a service to members in the UK, available through the BCS web-site.   I don't know how many of us have found employment through contacts made at BCS meetings, but it's certain that the majority of people at branch meetings are in the industry and keen to talk about what they do.

Meetings will be held in Hemel Hempstead.   We continue to benefit from the generous hospitality of Steria Limited, who have also sponsored printing of the programme card.   Latest details will be posted on our web-site (www.herts.bcs.org).   I would like to record my thanks to the committee for their considerable efforts in assembling the programme and physically stuffing the envelopes - even IT isn't all technology!

As always, your suggestions for future presentations will be most welcome.   As a final carrot, some BCS 50th anniversary mugs are still available for collection in person at meetings.   I trust you will enjoy the programme and I look forward to welcoming you to the meetings.

Yours sincerely,

Hertfordshire Branch Chairman

Committee Report for 2006 - 2007

Welcome to the 2007 Annual General Meeting of the Hertfordshire Branch, and thank you all for coming.

We hope you liked the Committee's varied choice of meeting topics for the 2006 - 2007 season.   Attendance at meetings has been very good, mostly between 30 and 40 which we hope is because of the interesting topics chosen.   Often the conference room is almost at full capacity, occasionally overflowing.

Each branch has an obligation in BCS rules to organise four meetings a year.   We have achieved eight so considering quantity alone, we have exceeded our quota twofold.

In June our AGM preceded a talk on the NHS Patient Care Records System, the world's biggest IT project.   Our speaker was BT's Brian Gorman, Chief Technology Officer, who fielded many questions from the large audience.

In September David Russell from Hewlett Packard's NonStop Enterprise Division spoke to us about fault-tolerant computing, tracing the history of their current NonStop™ servers from the products originally sold by Tandem Computers Inc. of Silicon Valley, taken over by Compaq, now merged with HP.

The topic of our October meeting, Business Continuity Management (a Buncefield Story) attracted a capacity audience.   We learned from Richard Potter, of Steria Limited, who host our Branch Meetings, of their first hand experience using their Business Continuity Plan to recover quickly and successfully from the explosion.

In November Andrew Yeomans, VP of Global Information Security for Dresdner Kleinwort, spoke about "The Future of Information Security, or Farewell Firewalls".   He introduced us to concepts such as Deperimeterisation, and his work with the Jericho Foundation concerning boundaryless information flows.

Our January meeting, "Project and Programme Accounting" by John Chapman showed us his approach to reconciling the often very different requirements of project management and the finance function.   John has written the only available textbook to address this topic.

February's meeting concerned "Massively Parallel Architectures" given by Dr. Colin Egan of the University of Hertfordshire.   His research concerns "Processing In Memory" which along with parallelism allows much faster memory access, a state-of-the-art technique used in at least one games console.

Our March meeting "Mobile Computing" was given by Rick Chandler, chairman of the EEMA Wireless Group.   He had just returned from the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, and was able to tell us of the very latest products now available in the area where mobile phones and PDAs converge.

Our April speaker was Tim Hubbard of BT who spoke on 21CN (21st Century Network).   This is the new IP-based national system using the very latest technologies to produce a physically less complex system currently already being rolled out to the first of 20 million end-user connections across the UK.

We gained two new committee members last year, Colin Hill and John Pearce.   They brought new experience to the committee, and we really appreciate their new ideas and energy.   Unfortunately work took Colin to Swindon earlier this year, so the committee eventually increased in size by only one.

This last season all our meetings apart from this one have again been in the premises of Steria Limited in Hemel Hempstead.   I wish to state here the Branch's appreciation of this generosity in hosting our meetings, and for colour-printing our annual programme card to a very professional standard.

Branch membership has risen from 1195 last year to 1369 (up 14.5%), although 263 of this number are secondary members.   We have many talented I.T. professionals in the Branch.   I hope that one or two members here tonight might like to share their enthusiasm by standing for election to the Branch Committee.   If so, please consider that suggestion awhile and make yourselves known at a later stage in the proceedings.

I'm now at the end of my fifth year as Chairman, and before that I was Treasurer.   You will see from the agenda that I'm not standing for re-election.   This is not because of any diminished belief in the BCS as a professional body, far from it, but more because of increased age.   Now is the time to pass the baton to a younger candidate.   Finally I must mention my sincere gratitude to all the members of the Committee for their enthusiasm, hard work and ability to track down potential speakers and persuade them to present to us.   Without their efforts there would be no Branch meetings.   So once again I wish to thank all twelve of them.

Yours sincerely,

David N. Smith

Hon. Chairman, Hertfordshire Branch, British Computer Society, on behalf of the Committee.