This week marks the start of an incredibly busy period for me and the team, alongside some special life events for a few members of the team.
Kerry has been leading and organising the UK Pavilion for the ITS World Congress in Dubai, which has been a feat of many moving parts! This has included designing the pavilion, co-ordinating meetings between the UK, United Arab Emirates, British Chamber of Commerce colleagues and civil servants and meeting with connected organisations, TfWM and others. In addition, Kerry has also been busy over the last few weeks organising Ambassador receptions, UK Pavilion Receptions, SME involvement and TTF involvement. Next week will see the culmination of all these activities at the ITS World Congress, and I have to say, Kerry has been amazing! Incredibly, she has also managed to get married in amongst all this, whilst continuing her work for Strictly Highways!
Speaking of weddings, as many of you who read Susanne’s comment in last week’s Insight will know, she is beyond excited for her daughter’s wedding which takes place this week. Susanne has also been incredibly hard-working (and amazing!) doing all the brilliant things she does for Strictly, with Charlotte, Claire, Shelley, and Karen supporting. Together, they have been working to organise delegate bookings, speakers, in-conference activities, and all that comes with making Strictly the success it is. The team are buzzing with excitement for all the upcoming events we are doing this Autumn, but of course Strictly is very close to our hearts.
Meanwhile, Dan and Karla have published an innovation survey as part of our sector insights work. If you have not already responded, you can do so here and this will help provide valuable information for our proposed Innovation report. We plan to share early results from the survey at next month’s Strictly Highways.
This week, I also had the pleasure of chairing and attending the JCT Symposium at Nottingham University, one of the few “learned” non-academic conferences in the signals sector. Now in it is 29th year, the symposium is an incredibly important annual event. For me, the dissemination of knowledge includes learning from well-crafted technical papers. There must be a continuum of knowledge transfer insights, including the types of papers you see at the symposium, and with my TTF hat on, this is something that is incredibly important for us to support.
Finally, I would like to share a ‘lovely thought’ that ties into this week’s title. While at the JCT Symposium, I caught up with Professor Eric Sampson, CBE. Eric is the epitome of industry grandee in ITS circles, both here in the UK and Europe. With 40 years service at the DfT, Eric is most certainly worth reading about.
Eric and I share an interest and passion in horses, and during our conversation, he delighted me with a remark that resonated: “….horses were the original intelligent transport system”. For me, that is what I enjoy the most about my job. It isn’t just the things we do at LCRIG, but the many, many people, both public and private sector, that I get to meet and have conversations with.
Paula Claytonsmith, CEO