What only one update in a week? What have I been up to since I got back from the Boston conference?
On Tuesday, I met up with an old PR friend – internal communications consultant (and fellow cyclist) Liam Fitzpatrick (Working Communication) – and then with Peter Goodwin of the PIX Protocol – hoping to develop the PIX offering further this year. Both meetings took place in the new St James’s Square headquarters of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations; I’ve been a full member for some years, and with the new ‘drop-in’ facilities (complete with free wi-fi) for members, I think it will be a regular meeting place from now on.
Wednesday saw me attend a CICA seminar on IT and the law: Marketing and e-Commerce, held at Arup’s offices in Fitzroy Square. I wrote about the CICA last month, and was pleased that the seminar enabled me to meet the new CICA manager Davendra Patel (interestingly, we share some common ground in that we both worked for Carillion; he was also involved with Carillion’s first investigations into extranet technologies, notably through their involvement with Bidcom UK). Unfortunately, while the seminar content was excellent, only a handful of delegates attended – underlining my concerns about purpose, direction and continued viability of the CICA.
On Thursday, I had a morning meeting at Crest Nicholson in Weybridge, then spent the afternoon at my desk at BIW in Woking, clearing as much work as possible ahead of another day out of the office. On Friday, I went up to Manchester to speak to project management students of Nuno Gil at Manchester Business School (my second trip to talk to his students); I also met with one of his doctoral students, Amjad el-Tayeh, who is working on a project, IDRAK, supporting ‘digital socialisation’ in capital engineering design projects – a good chance to brush down my postgraduate sociology studies.
