Being a consultancy that specializes in providing our clients with answers to problems required that we very early on had to adopt a Knowledge Management approach. We review, generate and process literally thousands of documents a year, which are relevant to the work we do. We think that we have struck upon an approach that works well for a distributed team of people working on a variety of differing projects in different sectors.
We store most our documents in the “cloud”, we have made our email and calendaring available via remote devices and have integrated our document management into our groupware so we are able to track documents across consulting processes e.g. conception, billing, pitching and so forth. We have also tied together RSS feeds and video streams into the landing pages of our Knowledge Management System, thereby allowing out team to not only look at proprietary information but also public domain information that is related to the project at hand.
We’ve noticed that many of our clients have struggled with conceiving their own knowledge management approaches. Sometimes their approaches seem to be driven by a fascination with new technology and other times the approach seems to be driven without consideration of the real cultural changes that need to take place within the organistion and its network; surprising organisations struggle to formalize the informal process of knowledge sharing.
This three-part slide excellently represents what knowledge management is, how it benefits the organization and what is needed to get knowledge management to work.
This is a new research report on income trends in South Africa.
This report presents a detailed analysis of changes in both poverty and inequality since the fall of Apartheid, and the potential drivers of such developments. Use is made of national survey data from 1993, 2000 and 2008. These data show that South Africa’s high aggregate level of income inequality increased between 1993 and 2008. The same is true of inequality within each of South Africa’s four major racial groups. Income poverty has fallen slightly in the aggregate but it persists at acute levels for the African and Coloured racial groups. Poverty in urban areas has increased. There have been continual improvements in non-monetary well-being (for example, access to piped water, electricity and formal housing) over the entire post-Apartheid period up to 2008.
From a policy point of view it is important to flag the fact that intra-African inequality and poverty trends increasingly dominate aggregate inequality and poverty in South Africa. Race-based redistribution may become less effective over time relative to policies addressing increasing inequality within each racial group and especially within the African group. Rising inequality within the labour market – due both to rising unemployment and rising earnings inequality – lies behind rising levels of aggregate inequality. These labour market trends have prevented the labour market from playing a positive role in poverty alleviation. Social assistance grants (mainly the child support grant, the disability grant and the old-age pension) alter the levels of inequality only marginally but have been crucial in reducing poverty among the poorest households. There are still a large number of families that are ineligible for grants because of the lack of appropriate documents. This suggests that there is an important role for the Department of Home Affairs in easing the process of vital registration.
This report presents a detailed analysis of changes in both poverty and inequality since the fall ofApartheid, and the potential drivers of such developments. Use is made of national survey data from 1993,2000 and 2008. These data show that South Africa’s high aggregate level of income inequality increasedbetween 1993 and 2008. The same is true of inequality within each of South Africa’s four major racialgroups. Income poverty has fallen slightly in the aggregate but it persists at acute levels for the African andColoured racial groups. Poverty in urban areas has increased. There have been continual improvements innon-monetary well-being (for example, access to piped water, electricity and formal housing) over theentire post-Apartheid period up to 2008.2. From a policy point of view it is important to flag the fact that intra-African inequality andpoverty trends increasingly dominate aggregate inequality and poverty in South Africa. Race-basedredistribution may become less effective over time relative to policies addressing increasing inequalitywithin each racial group and especially within the African group. Rising inequality within the labourmarket – due both to rising unemployment and rising earnings inequality – lies behind rising levels ofaggregate inequality. These labour market trends have prevented the labour market from playing a positiverole in poverty alleviation. Social assistance grants (mainly the child support grant, the disability grant andthe old-age pension) alter the levels of inequality only marginally but have been crucial in reducingpoverty among the poorest households. There are still a large number of families that are ineligible forgrants because of the lack of appropriate documents. This suggests that there is an important role for theDepartment of Home Affairs in easing the process of vital registration.
Last night the Riverlea community took to the streets protesting poor service delivery by local government. Riverlea is the latest community to vent its frustrations angrily about poor municipal service delivery.
Since the new national government administration has come in there has been a lot of change taking place in the local government space. A lot of reviewing, rethinking and restructuring has taken place.
The current Director General Elroy Africa delivered the presentation above yesterday at the Local Government Indaba. Its a frank, harsh presentation outlining the problem areas in local government, it’s great to see this type of presentation and suggestions it contains.
However I still think there is one thing missing what is the model that we are hoping to building local government into? Setting targets around which services should be delivered and improving the execution ability is good but without knowing what the game plan is, we could be spending a lot additional time and money to arrive at a similar state later, because everyone busies themselves with being busy.