Another year of UKOUG conferences is over and both from my own perspective and from feedback I received, this year in Birmingham the 3 conferences, Apps16, Tech 16 and JDE16 were better than ever.
Sunday evening before conference is
always the time for Volunteers drinks. This social event is an important part
of the agenda designed to thank all the people who work behind the scenes in a
voluntary capacity to bring the annual conferences together. Our volunteers
are at the heart of UKOUG and as well as event planning, they
contribute in key roles throughout the year including governance, strategy
and contributions to our publications.
Until I stepped into the President
position last year I had no idea how many people were involved in selecting and
organising the speaker sessions that happen every year in December. These
people are the backbone of our conference and are committed to making sure the
event is a success - we couldn't run it without them. I'd encourage anyone who
may be interested in helping to plan next year's events, to join UKOUG as a
volunteer. It's extremely rewarding and also quite fun.
Monday's opening keynote from Neil
Sholay, head of Digital for Oracle EMEA, was a big hit with everyone. Neil's
talk was about Data Driven Business. Neil had some great insights on this
topic, including telling us that fewer than 5% of businesses truly understand
the value of their own data.
"Information is replacing
technology as the most critical business asset"
We also announced the UKOUG speaker
awards on Monday. These awards recognise the high calibre speakers that
support UKOUG. The winners are decided by feedback given by delegates at the
previous year’s conference combined with judges scores. This is why we at
UKOUG encourage all conference delegates to score the speaker sessions they
attend; we want to identify the sessions that are of most value to attendees
and also to reward the very best speakers.
As
a member of the UKOUG Board I don’t get time to attend many sessions but I did
manage to sneak in 2 or 3 each day and the sessions I attended were excellent;
they included a talk on IoT and Industry 4.0, the 4th industrial
revolution, Nationwide Building Society’s Oracle Cloud adoption and the JDE
Keynote where Lyle Ekdahl, Gary Grieshaber and Bob Monahan announced a series
of JD Edwards Digital Transformation Workshops to be held in the in the UK starting
in January 2017. Sadly, I missed the JDE
Ideathon on Wednesday but I followed it on Twitter and it seemed like a great
success. I’m looking forward to seeing the winning idea in a future JDE
release.
This round-table event
lasted 45 minutes but everyone seemed to agree it could have been twice as long
as the conversation was still going strong when the whistle blew for the 9am
speaker sessions. Next year perhaps we should extend this session to allow us
to continue the debate.
On
Tuesday morning we held a Women in IT breakfast which was very well attended
and proved to be a worthy of an early start, both as a forum for discussing
ideas and as another networking opportunity.
Tuesday
night at conference is the big social event of the week where we all get a
chance to network in a more relaxed, informal setting.
This year the evening was complete with karaoke, virtual reality, casino, photo booth and a fantastic Blues
singer, Miz Suzy D, aka Susan Duncan our very own UKOUG Oracle liaison.
Those of us
who serve on the UKOUG board are elected for a fixed term and my own term as
President comes to an end in March 2017. It’s been an absolute pleasure
representing Oracle customers in the UK and although I’ll be very sad to step down,
I’m delighted that our members have voted Paul Fitton as my successor. Paul
took to the stage on Monday morning and got to meet many of our members,
volunteers and partners during the event so our handover is starting already
and I couldn’t hope for anyone better to step into this position when I move
on. I won’t be going far though and hope to be involved with UKOUG in a
voluntary capacity for many more years to come.
