Friday 3 July 2015

Blame the HoD.....

A couple of days ago I went on a training course - not done one for a while :-)  This was on the Health and Safety Liabilities and Responsibilities for Senior Managers, especially Heads of department. Sounds a bit dry, but it was very interesting, and I want to say enjoyable, but scary might be a better word.  We worked through a number of case studies of accidents at various Universities, where we had to work out if anyone was prosecuted, who was, and if they were found guilty. Some very relevant ones to us - a student falling of a scaffolding tower in a theatre workshop for example. Basically, in most cases someone was prosecuted, many they were found guilty of something, and mainly it was the Head of Department!

Wednesday I was in London, and went to the Chemistry Club again, always a good event. Meeting lots of CIOs from private and public sectors.  We had a talk from the CIO of John Lewis about the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship. I met some colleagues from JISC and we talked about some exciting developments coming up, and I even had a fascinating talk with someone from the Lotus F1 team about the amount of data they analyse during a race, with a portable datacentre trackside!

Other things this week include a post implementation review of our Incident Contacts project, and some meetings between me and Heads of Departments - I'm trying to get round all of them before the end of the summer. It's proving to be an extremely interesting and valuable exercise.

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