As conference season has drawn to a close, and as my inbox is strangely quiet due to the majority of my HEUG colleagues celebrating Thanksgiving, it's a good time for some reflection.
2018 has been a special year for the HEUG:
We celebrated the retirement, after 20 years of excellent service, of our first Executive Director - Lew Conner!
We celebrated our first ever 'Partners of the Year' - College Scheduler By Civitas Learning and CY2 Consulting!
We announced a new strategic partnership with Tambellini
We've welcomed at least 6 new member institutions (could be more but I can't get up to date figures as everyone is celebrating Thanksgiving!)
Our Advisory Groups have been really busy this year - we've seen an increase in blogs and forum posts across all the groups and some really fabulous initiatives to ensure they remain engaged with their communities and through this ensure that Oracle development hear the collective voice of our membership in respect of technology and application needs, aspirations, and plans.
We've welcomed new faces to the Oracle Team - notably Nicole Engelbert (Vice President, Higher Education Development) and Geof Corb (Vice President, Higher Education Customer Success), Jane Scott (Head of Global Customer Engagement - Student Cloud) and Yvonne Baur (Vice President Product Management - Higher Education). As the job titles and the experience of our new colleagues indicate, this has been a very deliberate action by Oracle to focus on customer engagement and customer success - one which, as I speak to members at our HEUG conferences, is truly making a difference.
And perhaps most exciting for me this year has been the realisation that we have now reached a critical mass of members implementing or using the cloud SAAS products and as such we are actively developing services specific to that cloud-customer community. In my reflective mode it seems that this closely mirrors the circumstances that led to the creation of the HEUG some 20+ years ago. As such, supporting this new cloud customer community is a natural development for the HEUG, leveraging the toolset developed over 20+years (and still developing), to provide communication channels, educational webinars from the community and from partners, and professional conferences. There should be more news on this in the next few weeks...so stay tuned!
2018 has indeed been a special year for the HEUG!
As individuals, as institutions, and as the HEUG community, we are experiencing and driving so much change! It's a good thing to stop every now and again to reflect on how far we have come. And then take some time to recharge and get ready for the changes still to come!