Once again, I have enjoyed and been privileged to chair the South Region on Members’ behalf for the past twelve months.  The Society has continued to evolve over this time and our Region has held some interesting and engaging events; three open regional meetings and our second Professional Development Day.

As I reported last year, the Society has had some challenges to overcome, both financially and organisationally, and has tackled these head on through a number of service reviews.  Work continues on these but early signs are promising and will build the foundations for Socitm to develop a well-focused and increasingly accessible range of services for Members.

One visible change many of you will have seen is the new website.  Whilst it had a few teething problems as any good IT project worth its salt should, it has developed into a powerful resource, far beyond what was previously available.  The library functions and powerful search tools make finding content much faster and more reliable, whilst GovXchange add a huge wealth of collaboration functionality and valuable content for Members, with the whole package looking fresher and more dynamic.

Within the region we have held four meetings with some excellent content in each.  We aimed for an extra consultation session on Transformational Local Government, but alas the timing over the Summer was poor and interest too low to proceed.  It is worth mentioning how important is it for the Committee to get good feedback from Members regarding the relevance and value of activities, the content and the timing, particularly ahead of an event if the fit isn’t good and we try to encourage this through eMail prompts and during our preceding meetings.

For the other events we have run three related themes on collaboration.  We have reviewed opportunities for joint data networking and information sharing, covered practicalities and real life experiences of shared services including a highly valuable session on how Government Connect might support this, and focued on opportunities for collaboration between Members on key issues.  We included in the programme a fascinating session on Hampshire’s SNEN 101 service that although currently de-emphasised by the Government, provided real value when considering sharing services and interoperability with Emergency Services.  Most of all, I hope we have facilitated sharing information and good practice to help ensure we don’t all keep reinventing the wheel.

We ran our second Professional Development Day in November and this was even more successful than the first and allowed our region to collaborate with London Region for the first time.  We raised the important issue of the Government IT Profession that was created following the Transformational Government white paper in 2005.  A number of our regional Members have become more involved in the programme with Jos Creese chairing the Local Government steering group and Bernard Gudgin taking the IT profession lead for Socitm.  We also looked at ITIL and how the CIO can act as agent for Transformation.

Your region continues to be one of the best represented across a broad range of Socitm activities at National Council and leads Events through Ken Boxhall, Insight through Jos Creese, Performance Management Group through Janet de Rochfort, Retired Members through Bernard Gudgin, Subscribers through David Bryant and me for the Region and the National Council’s Planning and Urgency Committee.  Many others from our region invest much time and energy making the Society so good and my thanks go to all.

The committee have tried to represent your interests and views inside and out of Socitm and I would like to extend my sincere thanks to each of them:

Marilyn Rogers, secretary
Ken Boxhall
Tim Dawes
Bill Parslow (a special thanks for chairing the September meeting)
Bob Thomas
Richard Wilkinson

Without their dedication Socitm would not have a South Region group at all.

Finally, I’m happy to report that our business plan and finances are on track and costs for our events continue to be kept to a minimum through the kind involvement of our sponsors.  I hope all our Members feel they have gained value from the Society’s activities over the past year and I continue to look forward to this continuing through the coming term.

Nick Roberts, Chair Socitm South
13 June 2007