March has seen the usual high tempo of activities at UKDSC. Working front of house means that I benefit from meeting all of our visitors, which allows me to regularly engage with the DGP founders, UKDSC associates, Community of Interest members and government representatives.
Visits to the Market Intelligence Cell (MIC) have been growing since the turn of the year, and we have had around 26 visitors in to view the data this month, with really positive feedback.
I contribute weekly to the MIC by producing and distributing a roundup of key Defence and Security ‘Think Tanks’. I look closely at the reports and analysis that Defence institutions push out and use this data to identify threats, scenarios and capabilities through a geo political perspective. This supports our international market insights and capability development work.
At the beginning of the month we held a 2020 Vigilance Workshop where industry were invited to discuss potential interest in the scheme as well as the development of a draft Novel Collector programme. I assisted in facilitating this workshop and we had a really good turnout on the day. I also took part in a Stakeholder mapping workshop within our business team as we looked to identify our important partners and how we could manage those relationships in a more effective way. It was a really useful exercise that had separate input from the different departments in the organisation in order to improve engagement all-round.
The highlight of the month for me was the visit of the Acquisition Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA) from the Japanese MoD. It was really positive to have another international engagement and marked the increasing awareness of our work overseas as well as domestically. I was tasked with feeding in research to a presentation identifying commonalities between our two countries. We had really encouraging feedback from their visit and we are expecting more and more of these type of engagements.
Unfortunately we have a couple of people finishing their secondments this month with their parent companies bringing them back into the fold. Whilst they leave big shoes to fill, it’s always great to have a fresh perspective and a new pair of eyes amongst the team.
Will Dean – Research Assistant
