Martin Greenwood and I were back in London to meet Clive Taylor, Sue Davis and Nicola Bain from Gartner, at the Cumberland Hotel, near Marble Arch.
Our meeting was prompted both by the impending need to renew, renegotiate, or allow to lapse, an existing contract (due to expire at the end of August) for the provision of discounted Gartner Research services to Local Government through Socitm, and to follow-up on potential collaboration on Green ICT services for Local Government.
In the event, we agreed that we weren't yet ready to move forward on the latter topic, but we did agree to set-up a further three meetings at Gartner's offices in Egham to explore the potential for working together on Research, Consulting and Events.
The Research meeting would consider the overall relationship between our organisations, whereas the other two meetings will be specifically discuss whether there are opportunities for Gartner Consulting and Socitm Consulting to work together, playing to one another's strengths, and whether there is potential for Gartner (which we were told is the UK's biggest IT Events organiser) to provide Socitm with an Events Management service. Holidays permitting, we hope to set all three meetings up within the next few weeks.
I returned home to work on an article I promised to Government Technology on "Information Sharing across Government" (flowing Sir Ian Magee's recent review of Criminality Information), and also to prepare for tomorrow's "Capitalising Income" meeting, in which we'll be considering trading business cases including the ones relation to Newham's Telecommunications Convergence Strategy.
Among the correspondence I dealt with, there was also confirmation of a meeting with Kable to discuss potential provision of an Events Management service, and a memo from Computer Aid International confirming what I had been told at the London Connects Conference – that the 100,000th PC they sent to Ethiopia was part of a consignment donated by the London Borough of Newham! Links to photos of Newham PCs in use at the Cistercian Brothers School, in Ethiopia, and in Selam Orphan, Destitute Mothers and the Aged Association, Ethiopia were included.
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