This is my first effort at a chair’s blog. My intention is to provide a means to set out my thoughts on how the IT industry and SCL is developing. I have had my hols this year and am now back (broke) in the office working on IT contracts. The summer blues are kicking in because everybody else seems to have gone on holiday. I have this theory that the business moves for the autumn in the IT sector are set by the captains of industry as they sit on the beaches at St Tropez or wherever and take stock.
It’s certainly going to be an interesting “new” business year in September. In the public sector the Government’s planned spending round proposals are casting something of a shadow. In the private sector the recovery is taking hold if slowly. Still I saw in the Sunday papers that the UK economy is forecast to grow faster than that of the US or the rest of Europe, which is good news parochially, though I think we all now have to think and act globally and are affected by growth or recession in any of the significant economies.
And SCL? Well we are well under way in implementing our business plan to improve the services we offer our members and to meet our objectives. You will see many of the fruits of this on our web site. We are now showing much more of a rolling programme for future events and have established more organised links to other sites. I commend a read of the history of SCL under “About SCL”. I learnt a lot about the origins of our society as we put this together, notably that for the first half of our existence we were much more focused on the technolgy itself than the practice of IT law. Our annual conference in October continues our themed approach with a focus on software. Our real objective as a society is to provide a community for IT lawyers, which is epitomised by meeting at the conference – so do come along.
We are also looking at some exciting new initiatives like an IT lawyers accreditation scheme, so watch this space. I will use this blog to tell you my ideas and priorities as chair and welcome any feedback, positive and constructive of course!
Happy holidays.
Clive
