Down and out in the Grand Medina Melbourne

Tomorrow I am chairing the third IT Centre of Excellence face-to-face meeting in Melbourne for CPA Australia, and because of the wonderful issue of daylight savings between Queensland and Victoria, I have decided to fly down the night before.  I sometimes wonder whether our interstate colleagues (and local politicians) really appreciate the difficulties that whole one-hour of daylight savings makes.  For instance, to be at a meeting tomorrow morning at 10am in Melbourne, I have to wake up at 3.30am to catch a 5.05pm plane.  And actually, that’s cutting it fairly fine. 

For some bizarre reason, I am – this once – reluctant to wake up at that God-fearing hour and so have flown down the night before.  Cue small violins for CPA Australia, who now have to pay for my night in a hotel and breakfast. 

As it was, I left BDO K this afternoon at 4.30pm so that I could be sure to be in my hotel room by about 9.30pm. 

And so it is that I am down and out in the Grand Medina in Melbourne so that I can have a more leisurely approach to tomorrow’s meeting.  Certainly I am looking forward to the meeting – it’s our last one of the year and as it is a face-to-face meeting it will be totally focussed on strategic issues.  We seem to have gone close to closing most of our topics, and so we are all about setting our new agenda for the next twelve months. 

Technically I believe we are virtually all supposed to rotate off the committee, since I’ve been chair of the IT COE for nearly four years (three years since they were restructured) but as it currently is it is likely that we are there for as long as we want to (which seems to make sense to me). 

Ah vell, tomorrow we start discussing the future strategic direction of the COE.  Should be fun.  I am intrigued though that, when I was at a CPA function on Friday night, I mentioned to a colleague on another COE that we are looking at doing research on the impact of mobile technology and telework on work/life balance, he considered it to be somewhat cafe latte and ivory-towerish of us.  I’m not entirely sure what we are supposed to do – but he may have a point and I think we’ll bring some practical matters into the strategic agenda tomorrow. 

All in all, though, it’s been another good year for the CoE – not a stellar one, certainly, like last year, but a good one nonetheless – and so I am looking forward to working out where we want to go next year.  And loving it.