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Nottingham and Derby
The BCS Nottingham & Derby Branch serves over 1,000 BCS members in the Nottingham and Derby area and beyond. Our aim is Making IT Good for Society by delivering informative and engaging IT related events for everyone in the East Midlands. For details of our planned activities this year, please see the calendar page.
The branch is run for the benefit of its members and we greatly value feedback. You can either attend a Committee meeting, email us, or send us feedback.
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In our working lives we have tools that would seem magical to employees a hundred years ago. Our hand-held devices connect us immediately to most of the combined knowledge of humanity. Our working conditions have improved immeasurably. So why are levels of anxiety and depression so high?
Poor workplaces cause their staff to feel this way.
This leads to poor decision-making and organisational failure.
We will consider key personal and organisational factors which give rise to workplace stress, and what can be done about them. We'll look at how to build organisations that deliver high performance which is not the result of over-work.
We'll look at the way AI and machine learning help build the kind of places people really want to work. This talk will help you both as an employee and a manager to create an environment which allows for greater wellbeing and higher performance.
Monday 15th October
Gary Thornton (linkedin.com/in/garythornton1956) will provide an insight into the role of competency frameworks and the Digital Industries Apprenticeship Standards and will identify several questions that still need to be answered.
Topics that will be introduced include:
Competency Frameworks, Introduction to competency based qualifications and Employer engagement with the current qualification.
Monday 17th September
Skunk Works originates from World War II when a special R&D centre was set up by Kelly Johnson at Lockheed. Since the inception of the Skunk Works, this term has been generalised to apply to similar high-priority R&D projects at other organisations, which feature a small team removed from the normal working environment and given freedom from management constraints.
The presenters; John Taylor, Chris Davies and Dot Tudor are professionals with years of experience of delivering transformational change programmes across all types and sizes of organisations. John's technical career in the United States Air Force, Chris's award winning programs and co-founder of Condor alongside Dot, a recognised conference speaker nationally and internationally and a published Author, who is not only a Certified Scrum Trainer, winner of Best Agile Coach / Mentor at the UK Agile Awards, but a finalist in the Most Valuable Agile Player UK AND five years running and winner of the Award for Outstanding Contribution to a DSDM Team, combined skills provide a powerful presentation.
You have probably heard of Bitcoin, the digital money from the Internet, but how well do you understand the technology behind it called Blockchain? Is it all hype, or will fast digital money win over slow flat currencies?
Anthony Parker is a telecoms professional with over 14 years experience in the industry, working for companies such as LogicaCMG, Analysis Mason and Dun & Bradstreet (working for clients such as; Microsoft, Etisalat and Vodafone), and BT Retail consumer division.
He will delve into the depths of distributed peer to peer technology in an informal, engaging and friendly setting.
This talk will take you through what forks are, different consensus algorithms, smart contracts, the business use cases of blockchain technology and much more in this insightful and thought-provoking journey into the future of money.
Lastly, Anthony will touch upon mining, wallet management, trading crypto assets, best practice in avoiding common scams and possible insights into the next hot alt coin.
COME ALONG AND LISTEN TO AN EXPERT IN THIS FIELD! - Dr Taha Osman is a principal lecturer at NTU and the manager of Postgraduate studies in the Department of Computing and Technology.
Data Analytics Capturing, analysing, and sharing data is a major challenge for many organisations. Get it right and the data analysis can lead to insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves. According to Sir Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW, 'The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.' Berners-Lee et al (2001). In other words, Web that can store data that is both human and machine readable.
A ONE-OFF OPPORTUNITY TO HEAR ABOUT ALPHABAY AND DARK WEB MARKETS
Within the last few years, governmental bodies have been futilely trying to fight against dark web hosted marketplaces.
Alphabay and Hansa have been the largest dark web marketplaces in 2016-2017 and Alphabay has been without doubt the largest dark web marketplace till now. Through the combination of cryptocurrencies and nonstandard communication protocols and tools, agents can anonymously trade in a marketplace for illegal items without leaving any record.
A specialist team based at the University of East London, after an in-depth research on Agora in 2015-2016, turned its eyes on Alphabay. After refining their approach and developing new tools, they analysed the last weeks of life of Alphabay, before its seizure in July 2017. The team(s) have been investigating the Dark Web since 2015.
This presentation covers their findings on Dark Web markets.
The team behind the research includes Dr Andres Baravalle and Sin Wee Lee.
BE PREPARED FOR GDPR - BOOK NOW FOR A 'JUST IN TIME' OPPORTUNITY. The EU General Data Protection Regulation is due to come into force 25 May 2018.The regulation is being reflected in UK law. It applies to all sizes of organisation and across all sectors. The responsibilities are wide ranging and this is not just an IT data problem. The sizes of potential fines are large enough to get Board attention.
We welcome Carol Long to present this session which is designed to give an opportunity to understand how quality professionals can address their responsibilities and how it will affect all organisations, from large to SME and micro businesses.
IF YOU ASPIRE TO DEVELOP YOUR TECHNOLOGY CAREER, THIS TALK PROVIDES INSIGHT ON HOW THIS CAN BE DONE!
We welcome both Richard Simpson and Neil McGowan. Their presentation will be delivered in two parts.
Part 1: Making the Transition from University to the Workplace in IT by Richard, an expert in Graduates and the Millennial generation. He has experience of Graduate management in multiple large companies across Europe such as Accenture, Amazon, Heineken and De La Rue.
Richard has helped individuals to successfully complete the transition from university life to working life and helped employers and managers to retain, support and develop their younger generational employees, attaining a better understanding of their team and to improve performance.
Part 2: What skills do you need to become a CIO/CTO/CDO? by Neil, who has spent the last 15 years as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for multiple FTSE and PE/VC funded businesses, such as N Brown, Littlewoods/Shop Direct, United Utilities, Maplin Electronica and the Ministry of Justice. He is an expert in Information & Digital Technology who has spent many years coaching technology professionals to maximise their personal potential and create enjoyable, fulfilling careers.
Business technology is currently focused on Digital, the latest of a constant stream of transformational technologies that IT professionals need to embrace. Using this as an example, Neil will discuss how technology leaders adopt new technology, deliver innovation and business value while growing their personal capability and career in a fast moving world.
We welcome Ste Nadin (@SteNadinFJ), Chief Architect for FUJITSU's Business and Application Services Division in the EMEIA (Europe, Middle East, India and Africa).Ste has over 20 years of experience designing and delivering enterprise class solutions for some of the largest UK government departments and private business.
His current role is the custodian of the Fujitsu technical strategy ensuring it is aligned to business challenges and is responsible for evaluating new technology and trends in the market and ensuring capability is built where required.
So DevOps. It's the 'IN' thing. You may have heard that everyone needs to be doing it to stay competitive. But what is it?
Ste will aim to explain in a simple manner what is meant by DevOps in all of its aspects, how elements of it can be adopted into standard business process and what it will mean for the culture of the work place.
Ste will explore some of the issues that are usually faced along the journey from having to change how people work, introduction of tools and the commercial implications.
We welcome Gary Lefman, Chartered Engineer and BCS Fellow, who works for CISCO as the Internationalisation Architect. Gary's work is about the development of truly global products. His job is to make sure Cisco's new software and firmware can be used by people wherever they are in the world, regardless of language or culture.
The world is becoming ever more connected. What was once global is now local and it's happening much faster than we have ever experienced before. So, we must accelerate our thinking about how people use software, no matter what language they read and speak, script they write, or what culture they relate with.