Thursday 13th August

Hi - this post is going to be joke-free (like all of them I hear you cry)! To take a leaf out of Tony Blair's book I will focus on three things: communication, communication, communication. Of course the actual sound bite was ‘education, education, education’: maybe in this instance that would have worked just as well. At what stage does communication become education and visa versa? Here is an update on our current projects and how they will affect you:

Aquila / Juniper / Juniper XD - service will be discontinued as early in September as possible. If you are still accessing these products you need to speak with your account manager to understand what your service provision looks like in September and into October.

XML Gateway - a technical bulletin describing ways of managing updated tags and details of new lookups will be sent next week. Work on the new gateway is progressing well. We are now using previous calls from the old system to ensure they are all 'transformed' correctly in the new one. Access for testing will be organised as soon as possible.

HTML Gateway - this will be switched off in the last week of September.

Bulk data - a time line for delivery of data has been produced. However, we are still waiting final clarification around cut-off from Companies House. Hopefully a meeting on the 19th will answer any outstanding queries we have with Companies House.

myICC - myICC will have some page updates but training for key individuals around what has changed happened this week. This 'train the trainer' session means those individuals can now feed details out to everyone else in our organisation and they can then disseminate this to you over the coming weeks. Our sales and service teams will receive this training in late August.

A Companies Act seminar is being run by ICC in September. For those who cannot attend the seminar, a webinar using the same presentation will be delivered in September. The actual date for the webinar will be issued nearer the time.

Finally the project itself (like all projects of this magnitude) is running near the knuckle and, yes, in some parts we have used contingency to keep on track. But I think everybody in ICC has always known that a fixed deadline that will not change was always going to produce a project that as Alex Ferguson says has a ‘squeaky bum time’ element to it. But the focus remains very clear for all parts of the business and nothing, but nothing, is detracting anybody from this focus - believe me!