In Birmingham for the AoC Conference, November 2003

Tuesday 18 November 2003. I was in Birmingham with a colleague for the annual 3-day conference of the Association of Colleges.

This would be JISC infoNet's first showing at the conference and I was manning a stand in the exhibition hall with a colleague, Jacqui.

We had a few give-aways to draw people to our stall and lots of leaflets about topics we covered and areas where we could provide advice and support.

There were quite a few people I knew at the conference, representatives of various suppliers and software houses, a few college principals who I had known from previous work with NILTA, itself now part of the AoC, and also some college staff I knew from working with Management Information Systems software as I had been one of a small team that trained Lancashire Colleges in their use of Oracle and Oracle-based packages.

There were also familiar face from other Further Education support services such as Becta and other JISC Advisory Services and we went out for food at night as a fairly large group.

The back of Birmingham's ICC - International Conference Centre - backed onto a canal basin with hotels, restaurants and shops. It was quite a vibrant place.

It was my first visit to the AoC conference which for me would become an annual event.

Work Index

In Conference Mode

Before anyone comments I've gone quiet again, I must confess to being down in Birmingham at the 3-day Association of Colleges Conference.

Having sat through a number of ministerial sessions (stood through for one of them...) you could be forgiven for thinking that the conference theme was all about colleges engaging with business. It's an obvious priority at the moment and this is a good thing for me, because I'm currently project managing a JISC-funded project "Embedding BCE (Business & Community Engagement) through Business Process Improvement and Internal Engagement". A bit of a mouthful - so I'm calling it simply "Embedding BCE".

We're working with 5 institutional partners (UK colleges and universities) to find and highlight areas and examples of good practice and identify barriers and issues surrounding such work. It aims to help the 5 partners to identify ways improve their current business processes. It will give a picture of how well embedded BCE work is currently and produce online resources to help other institutions do the same for themselves.

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