Today’s global marketplace rewards nimble organisations that learn and reinvent themselves faster than their competition. Employees at all levels of these organisations see themselves as members of teams responsible for specific business processes, with performance measures tied to the success of the enterprise. As team members, they are “owners” of the process (or processes) to which they are assigned. They are responsible for both the day to day functioning of their process(s), and also for continuously seeking sustainable process improvements.
Transforming a traditionally designed “top down control” enterprise to a process-based organisation built around empowered teams actively engaged in business process re-engineering (BPR) has proven more difficult than many corporate leaders have expected. Poorly planned transformation efforts have resulted in both serious impacts to the bottom line, and even more serious damage to the organisation’s fabric of trust and confidence in leadership.
Tomislav Hernaus, in a publication titled “Generic Process Transformation Model: Transition to Process-based Organisation” has presented an overview of existing approaches to organisational transformation. From the sources reviewed, Heraus has synthesised a set of steps that collectively represent a framework for planning a successful organisational change effort. Key elements identified by Hernaus include:
Strategic Analysis:
The essential first step in any transformation effort must be development of a clear and practical vision of a future organisation that will be able to profitably compete under anticipated market conditions. That vision must be expected to flex and adjust as understanding of future market conditions change, but it must always be stated in terms that all organisational members can understand.
Identifying Core Business Processes:
With the strategic vision for the organisation in mind, the next step is to define the core business processes necessary for the future organisation to function. These processes may exist across the legacy organisation’s organisational structures.
Designing around Core Processes:
The next step is development of a schematic representation of the “end state” company, organised around the Core Business Processes defined in the previous step.
Transitional Organisational Forms/ Developing Support Systems:
In his transformation model, Hernaus recognises that information management systems designed for the legacy organisation may not be able to meet the needs of the process management teams in the new organisation. Interim management structures (that can function with currently available IT system outputs) may be required to allow IT professionals time to redesign the organisation’s information management system to be flexible enough to meet changing team needs.
Creating Awareness, Understanding, and Acceptance of the Process-based Organisation:
Starting immediately after the completion of the Strategic Analysis process described above, management must devote sufficient resources to assure that all organisation members, especially key managers, have a full understanding of how a process-based organisation functions. In addition, data based process management skills need to be provided to future process team members. It is not enough to schedule communication and training activities, and check them off the list as they are completed. It is critical that management set behavioural criteria for communication and training efforts that allow objective evaluation of the results of these efforts. Management must commit to continuing essential communication and training efforts until success criteria are achieved. During this effort, it may be determined that some members of the organisation are unlikely to ever accept the new roles they will be required to assume in a process-based organization. Replacement of these individuals should be seen as both an organisational necessity and a kindness to the employees affected.
Implementation of Process Teams:
After the completion of required training AND the completion of required IT system changes, process teams can be formally rolled out in a planned sequence. Providing new teams with part time support by qualified facilitators during the firsts weeks after start-up can pay valuable long term dividends.
Team Skill Development and Continuous Process Improvement:
Providing resources for on-going skill development and for providing timely and meaningful recognition of process team successes are two keys for success in a process-based organisation. Qualified individuals with responsibility for providing training and recognition must be clearly identified and provided with sufficient budgetary resources.
The Hernaus model for transformation to a process based organisation is both well thought out and clear. His paper provides an ample resource of references for further study.
For many people within the UK, water is not really something to worry about. Surely enough of it falls out the sky throughout the year that it does feel highly unlikely that we?ll ever run out of it. There certainly does seem to be an abundance of Branded Water available in plastic bottles on our supermarket shelves.
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
Despite this, Once-unthinkable water crises are becoming commonplace. If you consider that In England and Wales, we use 16 billion litres of clean drinking water every day ? that’s equivalent to 6,400 Olympic sized swimming pools.
Currently, water companies can provide slightly more than we need ? 2 billion litres are available above and beyond what we’re using. In some areas, though, such as south east England, there is no surplus and, as such, these regions are more likely to face supply restrictions in a dry year.
If we take little moment to reflect on some of the most notable water related stories over the past few years, we’ll start to get a picture of just how real the potential and the threat of water shortages can be.
Reservoirs in Chennai, India?s sixth-largest city, are nearly dry right now. Last year, residents of Cape Town, South Africa narrowly avoided their own Day Zero water shut-off.
It was only year before that, Rome rationed water to conserve scarce resources.
Climate change is likely to mean higher temperatures which may drive up the demand for water (alongside population growth) and increase evaporation from reservoirs and water courses during spring and summer.
The impact of climate change on total rainfall is uncertain, but the rain that does fall is likely to arrive in heavier bursts in winter and summer. Heavier rain tends to flow off land more quickly into rivers and out to sea, rather than recharging groundwater aquifers.
A greater chance of prolonged dry periods is also conceivable. This combined with the harsh reality that no human population can sustain itself without sufficient access to fresh water.
If present conditions continue, 2 out of 3 people on Earth will live within a water-stressed zone by 2025
What is water stress?
Water stress is a term used to describe situation when demand for water is greater than the amount of water available at a certain period in time, and also when water is of poor quality and this restricts its usage. Water stress means deterioration in both the quantity of available water and the quality of available water due to factors affecting available water.
Water stress refers to the ability, or lack thereof, to meet human and ecological demand for water. Compared to scarcity, water stress is a more inclusive and broader concept.
Water Stress considers several physical aspects related to water resources, including water scarcity, but also water quality, environmental flows, and the accessibility of water.
Supply and Demand
Major factors involved when water scarcity strikes is when a growing populations demand for water exceeds the areas ability to service that need.
Increased food production and development programs also lead to increased demand for water, which ultimately leads to water stress.
Increased need for agricultural irrigation in order to produce more crops or sustain livestock are major contributors to localised water stress.
Overconsumption
The demand for water in a given population is fairly unpredictable. Primarily, based on the fact that you can never accurately predict human behaviour and changes in climate.
If too many people are consuming more water than they need because they mistakenly believe that water is freely available and plentiful, then water stress could eventually occur.
This is also linked to perceived economic prosperity of a give region. Manufacturing demand for water can have huge impact regardless whether water is actively used within the manufacturing process or not.
Water Quality
Water quality in any given area is never static. Water stress could happen as a result of rising pollution levels having a direct impact on water quality.
Water contamination happens when new industries either knowingly or unknowingly contaminate water with their industrial practices.
Largely, this can happen and frequently does so because these industries do not take effective control of monitoring and managing their impact on communal water supplies. Incorrectly assuming this is the responsibility of an additional third party like the regional water company.
The truth is, water quality and careful monitoring of it is all of our responsibility.
Water Scarcity
Simple increases in demand for water can in itself contribute to water scarcity. However, these are often preceded by other factors like poverty or just the natural scarcity of water in the area.
In many instances, the initial locations of towns or cities were not influenced by the close proximity of natural resources like water, but rather in pursuit of the extraction of other resources like Gold, Coal or Diamonds.
For Instance, Johannesburg, South Africa is the largest City in South Africa and is one of the 50 largest urban areas in the world. It is also located in the mineral rich Witwatersrand range of hills and is the centre of large-scale gold and diamond trade.
Johannesburg is also one of the only major cities of the world that was not built on a river or harbour. However, it does have streams that contribute to two of Southern Africas mightiest rivers – Limpopo and the Orange rivers. However, most of the springs from which many of these streams emanate are now covered in concrete!
Water Stress and Agriculture
Peter Buss, co-founder of Sentek Technology calls ground moisture a water bank and manufactures ground sensors to interrogate it. His hometown of Adelaide is in one of the driest states in Australia. This makes monitoring soil water even more critical, if agriculture is to continue. Sentek has been helping farmers deliver optimum amounts of water since 1992.
The analogy of a water bank is interesting. Agriculturists must ?bank? water for less-than-rainy days instead of squeezing the last drop. They need a stream of real-time data and utilize cloud-based storage and processing power to curate it.
Sentek?s technology can be found in remote places like Peru?s Atacamba desert and the mountains of Mongolia, where it supports sustainable floriculture, forestry, horticulture, pastures, row crops and viticulture through precise delivery of scarce water.
This relies on precision measurement using a variety of drill and drop probes with sensors fixed at 4? / 10cm increments along multiples of 12? / 30cm up to 4 times. These probe soil moisture, soil temperature and soil salinity, and are readily repositioned to other locations as crops rotate.
Peter Buss is convinced that measurement is a means to an end and only the beginning. ?Too often, growers start watering when plants don’t really need it, wasting water, energy, and labour. By accurately monitoring water can be saved until when the plant really needs it.
Peter also emphasises that crop is the ultimate sensor, and that ?we should ask the plant what it needs?.
This takes the debate a stage further. Water wise farmers should plant water-wise crops, not try to close the stable door after the horse has bolted and dry years return.
The South Australia government thinks the answer also lies in correct farm dam management. It wants farmers to build ones that allow sufficient water to bypass in order to sustain the natural environment too.
There is more to water management than squeezing the last drop. Soil moisture goes beyond measuring for profit. It is about farming sustainably using data from sensors to guide us.
Ecovaro is ahead of the curve as we explore imaginative ways to exploit the data these provide for the common good of all.
A Quarter of the World?s Population, Face High Water Stress
Data from WRI?s Aqueduct tools reveal that 17 countries? home to one-quarter of the world?s population?face ?extremely high? levels of baseline water stress, where irrigated agriculture, industries and municipalities withdraw more than 80% of their available supply on average every year.
Water stress poses serious threats to human lives, livelihoods and business stability. It’s poised to worsen unless countries act: Population growth, socioeconomic development and urbanization are increasing water demands, while climate change can make precipitation and demand more variable.
How to manage water stress
Water stress is just one dimension of water security. However, like any challenge, its outlook depends on adequate monitoring and management of environmental data.
Even countries with relatively high water stress have effectively secured their water supplies through proper management by leveraging the knowledge they have garnered by learning from the data they gathered.
3 ways to help reduce water stress
In any geography, water stress can be reduced by measures ranging from common sense to innovative technology solutions.
There are countless solutions, but here are three of the most straightforward:
1. Increase agricultural efficiency: The world needs to make every drop of water go further in its food systems. Farmers can use seeds that require less water and improve their irrigation techniques by using precision watering rather than flooding their fields.
Businesses need to increase investments to improve water productivity, while engineers develop technologies that improve efficiency in agriculture.
2. Invest in grey and green infrastructure: D Data produced by Aqueduct Alliance – shows that water stress can vary tremendously over the year. WRI and the World Bank?s researchshows that built infrastructure (like pipes and treatment plants) and green infrastructure (like wetlands and healthy watersheds) can work in tandem to tackle issues of both water supply and water quality.
3. Treat, reuse and recycle: We need to stop thinking of wastewater as waste.
Treating and reusing it creates a ?new? water source.
There are also useful resources in wastewater that can be harvested to help lower water treatment costs. For example, plants in Xiangyang, China and Washington, D.C. reuse or sell the energy- and nutrient-rich byproducts captured during wastewater treatment.
Summary
The data is undeniably clear, there are very worrying trends in water.
Businesses and other other organisations need to start taking action now and investing in better monitoring and management, we can solve water issues for the good of people, economies and the planet. We collectively cannot kick this can down the road any further, or assume that this problem will be solved by others.
It is time, for a collective sense of responsibility and for everyone to invest in future prosperity of our Planet as a collective whole. Ecological preservation should be at the forefront of all business plans because at the end of the day profit is meaningless without an environment to enjoy it in!
The General Data Protection Regulation, abbreviated to GDPR, raised a storm when it arrived. In reality, it merely tightened up on existing good practice according to digital security specialists Gemalto. The right to withhold consent and to be forgotten has always been there, for example. However, the GDPR brings a free enforcement service for consumers, thus avoiding the need for third party, paid assistance.
The GDPR Bottom Lines for Data Security
Moreover, the GDPR has penalties it can apply, of the order that might have a judge choking on his wig. Under it, data security measures such as pseudonymisation (substitution of identifying fields) and encryption (encoding including password protection) have become mandatory. Businesses must further respect their client data by:
a) Storing it in a secure environment supported by robust services and systems
b) Having proven measures to restore availability and access after a breach
c) Being able to prove frequent effectiveness testing of these measures.
The General Data Protection Regulation places an onus on businesses to report any data breaches. This places us in a difficult situation. We must either face at least a wrist slap upon reporting failures. Alternatively, pay a fine of up to ?10 million, or 2% of total worldwide annual turnover.
The Engineered Weak Link in the System
Our greatest threat of breach is probably when the data leaves our secure environment, and travels across cyberspace to an employee, stakeholder, collaborator, or the client themselves. Since email became open to attack, businesses and individuals have turned to sharing platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, and so on. While these do allow an additional layer of password protection, none of these has proved foolproof. The GDPR may still fine us heavily, whether or not we are to blame for the actual breach.
How Hacking is Approaching Being a Science
We may make a mistake we may regret, if we do not take hacking seriously. The 10 worst data hacks Identity Force lists are proof positive that spending lots of money does not guarantee security (any more than having the biggest stock of nuclear weapons). We have to be smart, and start thinking the way that hackers do.
Hacker heaven is finding an Experian or a Dun & Bradstreet that may have shielded 143 million, and 33 million consumer records respectively, behind a single, flimsy cyber-security door. Ignorance is no excuse for them. They should simply have known better. They should have rendered consumer data unreadable at individual record level. The hackers could have found this too demanding to unpick, and have looked elsewhere.
How Data Encryption Can Help Prevent Hackers Succeeding
Encrypting data is dashboard driven, and businesses need not concern themselves about it works. There are, however, a few basic decisions they must take:
a) Purge the database of all information held without explicit permission
b) Challenge the need for the remaining data and purge the nice-to-haves
c) Adopt a policy of encrypting access at business and customer interfaces
d) Register with three freemium encryption services that seem acceptable
e) After experimenting, sign up for a premium service and be prepared to pay
Factors to Consider When Reaching a Decision Life Hacker?suggests the following criteria although the list is a one-size-fits-all
a) Is the system fast, simple, and easy to operate
b) Can you encrypt hidden volumes within volumes
c) Can you mass-encrypt a batch of files easily
d) Do all other files remain encrypted when you open one
e) Do files automatically re-encrypt when you close them
f) How confident are you with the vendor, on a scale of 1 to 10
It may be wise to encrypt all the files on your system, and not just your customer data. We are always open to a hack by the competition after our strategic planning. If we leave the decision up to IT, then IT, being human may take the easy way out, and encrypt as little as possible.
In a cutthroat market, where the competition is constantly on the attack to break into your market share, implementing a project-based system can give your organisation the necessary tools to be more efficient and agile.
However, rapidly changing consumer demands, technologies and other factors make it ever more difficult to generate a strategic advantage from projects, let alone develop one. Also since a large organisation can easily end up having to manage multiple projects at the same time, the new management paradigm can appear too complex.
What your company really needs is the expertise that can guide you starting from conception and planning, down through procurement and execution in order to maximise whatever resources you have. Each move must be well thought out so that there are clear goals and objectives as well as methods to achieve them.
Programme Management
Are you running multiple projects pointing to an overall strategic direction? Then you’ll need more than just a “scaled-up” version of project management to make sure every component’s work effort is well coordinated to achieve your enterprise’s desired outcomes.
Through our expertise in programme management, we’ll work with your stakeholders, executives and clients to achieve the following:
Design a well-articulated management structure and clearly define decision-making roles & responsibilities – This will ensure decisions are made rapidly with zero to minimal overlapping issues and to promote a unified, well-synchronised advance towards the common objective.
Set objectives then make sure they are met by guiding your key personnel in coordinating activities across projects.
Design or utilise existing financial models such that they adhere to your enterprise’s financial policies.
Develop procedures for reporting expenditures specific to the programme.
Establish the programme infrastructure, including
The appropriate technical environment and tools (e.g. hardware, software, communication, and other IT-related items)
IT staff and administrators
Evaluate your enterprise’s current IT architecture to determine whether it will suffice to achieve your objectives. If it doesn’t, propose options you can take to meet what is required.
Plan out activities that should take place in different levels in the organisation.
Implement a periodic review of the programme progress as well as of interim results to ensure everything is aligned with the strategic outcome.
Programme and Project Reviews
Whether we’ve helped you set up your programme or you did it on your own, time will come when you’ll need to know whether everything is going as planned. If it appears like the entire programme is going smoothly, chances are, something’s going awfully wrong somewhere. Remember, even the most well-planned projects and programmes are still under the mercy of unforeseen variables.
We’ve got highly specialised reviews for either projects or an entire programme. We’ll be able to provide you answers to questions like:
Are all projects aligned with the programme’s intended direction?
Are the people working on your projects as focused with the business rationale as they have been with meeting deadlines and utilising resources?
Where are your risks and exposures? How can they be remedied?
Is the project viable at all?
We understand how your staff would want to function normally as quickly as possible. Rest assured, our programme and project reviews are conducted swiftly and efficiently so that both interruptions and oversights are brought to a minimum.
After we’re done, you can expect a detailed quantitative assessment of your programme and/or projects’ status.
Basically, we’re not here to find mistakes; we’re here to help you find ways to correct them. If a project rescue is required, we’ll be the first to lend a hand.
Project Rescue
Believe it or not, many of our clients approached us not before or during their project’s planning stages. But rather, after having gone through sloppy execution, when they end up losing control. In other words, we’re usually at the receiving end of the distress signal, after they’ve punched the panic button.
While obviously this isn’t the ideal time to seek the aid of any expert because it means you’ve incurred unnecessary losses already, all is not yet lost. If the appropriate remedial actions are taken in a timely manner, you can still achieve highly acceptable end results.
In fact, in most of our experiences with project rescue operations, we’ve been able to put projects back on track – just the way the planners wanted them to be. We’ll also help you devise airtight strategies to prevent your project from going astray again.
At the end of our project rescue,
You’ll regain complete control
Milestones will be reached as planned
Requirements will be accomplished, and
The project will be realigned with ideal business directions
Project Governance Processes
Constructing a firm underlying structure is essential in any organisation. So before we’ll institute project management, we’ll do the following first.
Set up a PMO or Project Management Office to ensure, among others, that
Utilisation of facilities, budgets, technical support and other resources will be well coordinated
Work products can be tracked and reviewed
Issues regarding methodology and processes will be given appropriate attention
Training can be organised
Project management discipline be instilled in the IT department
Establish a steering committee to oversee the implementation of IT and business strategies
Fill up slots for a project manager, IT executive and a business sponsor and define the roles of each
Infuse project management practices to all affected units of the enterprise
Establishing PMOs, steering committees and other management structures is the easy part. Many organisations spend so much in order to create the structures related to project management, only to find out later that the effort has been all for naught. That’s why we won’t end there. Our objectives will therefore include the following:
To plant and cultivate an environment appreciative of project governance i.e. one that does not project it as just a bunch of bureaucratic processes and protocols.
To establish an organisational culture that starts at the top.
To make everyone involved understand that the power of project governance still lies in the hands of those who will ultimately implement it.
A project-driven enterprise is never propelled by a single project. Since multiple projects require a more complex governing structure, you’ll need to understand the intricacies of programme management.
