Dear Members,
2017 has been an exciting year for SSF UK. We have definitely lived our own values this year. We have been through a huge evolution in our Forum structure this year with a new team in place in the day to day running of the Forum in the form of Sharon and Meg. I am sure you will agree that they are huge assets to the Forum and bring with them a wealth of experience. They will provide a great service to all our members and help our community to grow and thrive.
To help move our community forwards, we launched our new website in July at our Leaders Summer Social. The new website provides a secure place for all our members to access information on all our events, participate in knowledge exchange through our discussion board and news pages and also access the resources we continue to build up with our partners. This interconnectivity is growing day by day and we hope that 2018 will see this become an invaluable resource for all our members.
Our Annual Conference this year saw us back in the Hilton Deansgate but this year our Future Vision brought Pepper the Robot and Virtual Reality to the table, right before Pepper was whisked off to star in an exhibition about Robots at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry! Other highlights of the conference were our amazing keynote speakers including Debra Searle, Jon White and Matthew Syed, who were all inspirational and moved some of our audience to tears. And of course, we also launched our Future Vision Awards at this year’s pre-conference dinner. These awards celebrate the successes of our members across our 3 values, Community, Leadership and Evolution and were extremely well received. 2018 will see us building on these awards, so please make sure you are keeping a note of those in your teams that deserve a nomination.
SSF UK wouldn’t be the success it is without the hard work of our network chairs who facilitate all of our network meetings across the year. This year has seen some great strides in building these meetings, with participation from across our membership. Our meetings have been held in a wide variety of locations including the IMAX and Coronation Street! A huge thank you to all our network chairs and the member organisations that have hosted this year.
2018 will see our networks grow stronger still, with plans in place for some excellent events already. Our Big Share Week will begin 2018, taking place between 26th February and 2nd March. This week will see cross functional working between our networks, interaction with our partners on key topics for 2018 such as GDPR and Brexit along with bite sized learning for all our members on our website.
We have held some excellent Leaders events this year, with our GBS Leaders Event at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, our summer social at RBS and our House of Commons luncheon to round off another successful year. We also co-hosted events with our partners and hope to introduce more of these events in 2018 alongside our partners to provide all our members with valuable events and learnings.
On behalf of the entire SSF UK Board of Directors and our management team,, I would like to thank you all for your support in 2017. 2018 will see us continue to deliver on our vision to lead and encourage the evolution of Shared Services.
Happy New Year to you all!
David
