Employed with the University of Derby, based in the Midlands of the UK, I've worked with PeopleSoft since 2005 during all of it's development from 8.8 through to 9.2 and PeopleTools 8.45 and onwards. More recently, I've also begun to work with SaaS Cloud offerings and the associated integrations. During my time in Higher Ed, we've seen a lot of change, in approach, execution and delivery. The pace of that change has been rapid and it continues to accelerate, offering exciting new opportunies as we move forward.
For this reason in 2013 I decided to apply to become a member of the Technical Advisory Group, as I wanted to be able to influence the direction of the product set on the community's behalf and take a role in helping to advocate and educate. I had an exciting first associate year in 2013 and was thrilled to be able to take up a full 3 year term in 2014. Since then I've been highly active in the community particularly within Life Cycle Management for which I've led the TAG's Work Group for the last two years. We've been able to provide an enormous amount of educational material about emerging technologies to the community in that time. In addition, I've been passionate about taking feedback back to the TAG's Oracle representatives to ensure the community's voice is being heard. I've also been monitoring the technical forums over my time with the TAG and have, on a number of occasions, been able to put forward the community's concerns, thoughts and feedback to Oracle. I continue to push hard to make sure those feedback loops are closed properly and get responses back out.
I'm also very heavily involved in the EMEA region where we've been nuturing a Technical Working Group over the last 4 years and endeavouring to expand the technical conversations within EMEA to again ensure there's an appropriate feedback route into the TAG's activities.
I've throughly enjoyed volunteering on behalf on the entire community, it's helped me grow professionally and I've met a huge number of people who are as passionate about their work, Higher Ed and our community as I am. I'm so proud to have been able to represent the HEUG and will continue to pour all my energy into the community as we find out together where the journey takes us next.