My Guest Blogger – Jacob Isherwood

Getting out and about…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent time getting to know my team better and understanding how the trading groups work and the challenges we have. It’s great to see the level of professionalism and technical skill in IT and the strong relationships we have across the group. As I’ve been talking to my team, I’ve been encouraging them to look outside Midcounties at how other organisations work and be cheeky to go and ask. We can shortcut the time it takes to make a change by learning from the mistakes and successes of others.

IT is an enabling service and when it works well it should make life easier for you to carry out your jobs and provide great experiences for our members. The Japanese have a term called Gemba which means the “actual place” and a Gemba Walk is about going out into the business and seeing what actually happens at the point of work. I’m a strong believer in this and am grateful to those letting me look around their places of work. Seeing behind the scenes at Norton Canes and having Vicky answer all my questions really brings to life what it takes to get products out there and deliver great service to our members and customers. It was interesting to see the membership PowerBI dashboards up on the wall that IT develop – we want to make sure we’re providing useful tools that help you do your job well.

Last week I also visited Walcot Nursery store in Swindon. Bev and the team gave an informative tour of the nursery and it was impressive to see the engaging environments we create for the children. It was interesting to hear how we support Special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) children and how they create an understanding of food sustainability through their gardening. It’s clear the dedication that the team have to the children under their care.

I’m already booked in to visit more colleagues across Travel, Healthcare and Utilities over the coming weeks.

Security and data…

Unfortunately, people will always be looking for ways to get into our systems and that means we all need to be a little less trustful of people contacting us out of the blue. 

We’ve done a lot of work to make sure our systems are secure, but that security only works with your help. It's something that's so important, as our members, customers and colleagues trust us to keep their data safe. A responsibility we take very seriously.

If you’re not sure about something you’re being asked to do, then tell them you’ll call them back and look for their contact details in Outlook. Always be watchful of being asked to do things urgently, particularly if it concerns money, sharing information or installing software.

Here are a few easy tips you can try:

• Protect your information before you send it - always password-protect files and send the password separately

• Beware of 'phishing' tactics - this is a fraudulent communication set up to access personal information

• Make your password harder to guess - avoid using common passwords on any device

Future of IT…

Recently we made some changes to how IT works, bringing support for Food back into the central IT team and helping provide support for Travel systems. I’m hoping changes like these will help us to provide a more joined up IT service across all our teams, whether that’s the applications you use day-to-day, our dashboards or the underlying infrastructure.

Over the next few months, we’ll be digging deep into our current system estate to help us invest in the right systems in the future. We’ve already got some exciting projects kicked off to help improve network connectivity and make more data available for reporting via PowerBI. We’ll also be putting more information on Colleagues Connect to explain our services and how to fix common issues you might have. As part of the longer-term strategy for WiFi, the team are are looking at how we can get the right connectivity in all our locations.

If you have any questions or would like to know to find out more then please drop me a comment below!