Happy New Year

Welcome back everyone - and a very belated Happy New Year. Here's to 2014, and I hope it will successful and peaceful one for everyone.

It's been a week of catching up for me - I've had four meetings with colleagues in what is almost a University meeting place, our Coffee Revolution - there's always several meetings going on in there. It's definitely good to get out of the office occasionally and chat with people away from phone calls and emails.

I've had a good meeting this week with a colleague fro procurement, where we looked at the ways we can work together, especially as we move towards purchasing services, not just hardware and software. That requires skills in supplier and contract management which we don't necessarily have.

We're also moving forward quickly now with the review of our student system, with secondments being advertised across the University for a project team to work full time on it. We're going to be using our Sheffield Professional web site for future ones which will be coming up soon.

The other thing I've been doing is keeping my eye on CES (Consumer Electronics Show - nice of them to name a show after me...) which has been happening this week in Las Vegas. I'd love to get there one day.  The consumer space is certainly driving a lot of what we do now, and we need to keep a watching eye on it. The big things coming out of it this year are curved televisions, health monitoring gadgets, wearable technology and drones. There's a nice round up in this BBC video here. There was also a "smart home" app which controls smart devices in your home - you can adjust the light, view rooms in the house, set heating controls, set the robot cleaner, start your washer - all remotely. If it would just do the ironing then it would be perfect....