Two days in the office followed by two conferences, one in London and another in Sun City, South Africa.
On Tuesday evening and all day Wednesday I attended the Gartner UK & Ireland CIO Community Executive Summit for the first time. Compared to other Gartner conferences, this one is very intimate, with only CIOs from the UK and Ireland in attendance. It was good to see some old faces and meet many new ones. As was true of the CIO Leadership Forum in March, the best slots were the roundtable sessions where people got to talk to each other. I wasn’t as taken by the plenary sessions this time, and it didn’t help that the venue was freezing cold for the whole day. Tuesday’s dinner was a good way to start things off, chatting to other CIOs and hearing a conversation between Pooja Bagga, Group CIO at The Guardian, and Paul Dongha, Head of Responsible AI and AI Strategy at NatWest Group, about — surprise! — AI.
As soon as the conference finished, I headed to Paddington Station to catch the train to Heathrow, and a flight to Johannesburg. One of my colleagues and friends picked me up from the airport on Thursday morning for the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Sun City. I felt very looked after as she handed me an incredibly thoughtful bag full of snacks for the journey.
It had been over a year since I was last in South Africa. Having worked in and around my Johannesburg-headquartered company for the past 17 years, I always feel a powerful sense of reconnection when I visit, both with colleagues and with the purpose of the organisation. The reason for this visit was to join our divisional Leadership Conference, being held over a couple of days at the resort.
On Thursday night we wandered down to The Shebeen to watch the opening game of the FIFA World Cup, where the South African team (known locally as Bafana Bafana, which means ‘the boys’ or ‘go boys’) took on their Mexican hosts. There were so many people there that I hadn’t seen in person for a long time. We gathered outside, eating a buffet dinner and shouting over the sound of the DJs before the match started. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite to plan, but that probably meant that people got to bed at a decent hour instead of celebrating all night.
The conference itself was excellent. Our colleagues in South Africa really know how to put on a show, one that is distinctly African. We had a mixture of keynote addresses, panel interviews and insights about significant recent deals that our company had been pivotal in achieving. During the breaks, I kept bumping into even more old friends and colleagues.
Towards the end of the day, we were treated to a conversation between our Group CEO and the Chairman and CEO of a leading US bank, probably one of the most significant leaders in our industry. It was amazing to have him dial in for the discussion. It made me think how some of the conferences I’ve been to bring in celebrities and sports personalities, but this always leaves me a little wanting; having someone on stage who is a significant person from one or both of the two areas I am involved in professionally — technology and banking — is always going to be more relevant and directly applicable to me.
After an exercise-starved week, I managed to get up and out for a couple of laps of the 5 km track at the Gary Player golf course. It was very cold until the sun came up, and I was regretting not bringing any thin running gloves. But the area was stunningly beautiful, with mist rising from the lake and impala chasing each other across the course.
We then hopped on a coach for a ride back to Johannesburg. On both legs of the journey, it was fascinating to see parts of the country that I hadn’t been through before. (Which, to be fair, is pretty much everything outside of the metropolitan area of Johannesburg.) I left the conference feeling connected, happy that I work for an organisation filled with such friendly and talented people.
This was a week in which I:
- Met with the project manager for a security infrastructure change to review the issues and actions log for the work. We took advantage of having people in the office to pull in our CTO to answer some of the more technical questions. It was a great session, making extensive use of the whiteboard; it would have been much more difficult if everyone had been working from home.
- Had a separate meeting on the same topic with our Head of Infrastructure and Operations to discuss and agree next steps.
- Joined the quarterly governance review meeting for a key contract that we have with our sister company.
- Met with colleagues on the disability-focused stream from our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum to catch up with where we are and what our to-do list looks like for the remainder of the year.
- Received draft feedback from an internal audit.
- Met with another potential vendor for our team offsite next month to brief them on our requirements and understand more about what they offer.
- Had our monthly departmental operational risk review meeting.
- Made some configuration changes to Tailscale running on my NAS drive, setting it up so that I can use it as an exit node and configuring it to use my two Pi-holes as DNS servers. I can now VPN back to my house and benefit from ad blocking wherever I am in the world.
- Welcomed my wife back home after a long weekend away. It was a shame we would only be together for two evenings before it was my turn to head out of the country.
Media
Video
- Watched Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) for the first time. It is excellent; funny and profound. The opening credits, where Rosie Perez dances to Public Enemy’s Fight the Power, are hypnotic. They seemed familiar; maybe MTV showed this sequence at the time as opposed to the official music video. Checking out Letterboxd reviews is usually good fun after watching a movie, but this time they really made me think. If you’ve seen the film, Wesley Stenzel’s and Penny’s reviews are worth reading. Aside from the themes of the film, I couldn’t help thinking how much the mass adoption of smartphones has taken away the everyday business of socialising with strangers. This point came up later in the week at our internal leadership conference too. I think I’m going to try to make an effort to keep my phone in my pocket when I’m out and about.
Web
- Another day closer to the end. Put your birthday in and behold.
Next week: Johannesburg.
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