IAP30
As trailed in July’s VSJ, this year’s Annual Symposium, celebrating the IAP’s 30th birthday, will be held at Trinity House on Thursday, 10th of October. There’s a flyer giving full details included with this issue. Please use it to make others aware of this event. You don’t have to be a member to attend and it’s always a very enjoyable and informative occasion. So if you can pass the flyer on to a colleague, pin it on a staff notice board, give it to a friend at a local university or even just pass it to your public library, you’ll be helping, at the very least, to raise the profile of your Institution.
Direct Debits: Originator’s Change of Name
The majority of IAP members pay their annual subscriptions by direct debit, taking advantage of the £5.00 discount we allow because it saves so much time. Most of you realise that the Director General is not allowed to dredge around in your bank account personally. The Institution uses an agent to collect the money and it is this agent’s name, not the Institution’s, that will appear on your bank statement.
This has caused understandable but unavoidable confusion in the past. Now a further layer of perplexity has been added because the agent has changed its name. For many years it was ‘Neil Lewis Associates’ or ‘NLA’. As a result of take-overs, it became ‘Miller Firstline’ and then ‘Miller Fisher’. It has just changed again and will now include the word ‘Rubicon’. While the changes are working through the system, any of these names could pop up on your bank statement.
We realise how troublesome this is for members but it is even more troublesome to reinstate direct debits after they have been cancelled in error. Could you just tuck this message in the back of your mind: before cancelling a mystery direct debit think, ‘Could it be the IAP?’
Annual IAP Council Award
You may recall that last year the Council instituted a prize for the best contribution to VSJ by an IAP member. This year, they have awarded it to Allen Woods, of JIT Software Ltd, for his three-article series on the development of systems requirement schemes to underpin software design. As last year, the prize is a weekend for two in a luxury hotel. Well done, Allen!
[Don’t forget to email eo@iap.org.uk with items of news about you or your company.]
