Strategy Planning at UKOUG

July is always a busy month for UKOUG, as well as a board meeting we also have our volunteers meeting, the main way we capture and share ideas. Luckily in NI we have 2 public holidays (12 & 13) which I can swap to take these 2 days off from Fujitsu.

This year the calendar was packed, I arrived back from Washington and the ODTUG conference on the Saturday, met up with Lisa Dobson my fellow director and went off to a 40th birthday party for James Morle, a fellow ACE Diretor and member of the OakTable and a great speaker for UKOUG. It is a measure of the friends you make in this circle that Graham Wood flew over from the US for the party and whilst he was over spoke at the UNIX SIG for UKOUG. Then Lisa and I went to Birmingham Sunday evening to ready ourselves for the strategy meeting that started early the next day.

To start, we revisited our Mission & Vision Statements and Values and what changed from the last time full review, about 4 years ago. The emphasis is on the Oracle Community and who is a member of that, what we decided was:

   - Those who use Oracle Products
   - Those who provide Products and Services around Oracle
   - Oracle themselves

Our Mission remains - Serving the Oracle Community and our vision is changing slightly to reflect the emphasis on this community member to:
To be the association in which everyone in the Oracle community engages.

We did not finish the next stage which is a full evaluation of our own customers and products so this may not be the final draft.

We had a facilitator to keep us on track and although we did get sidetracked occasionally we did make progress. As a board we need to decide what we can do with what we have. There is lots more to do and we took a lot more information from the volunteers the next day which will be an important part of our analysis.

There was a board dinner that evening which was a good time to get to know the new director Graham Spicer a bit better and then I went off for a relatively early night.

The next day we had a standard board meeting at 8.15. We are our own company in UKOUG and not outsourced to an operating company so there are statutory things we must cover. This and setting our next actions on the strategy process took us till 9.30 when the volunteers started to arrive.......