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.
“About 60% of municipalities cannot give evidence to account for the revenue they received. And mostly these are low-capacity municipalities, which means they get their revenue from the national treasury and do not have to collect the bulk of their revenue from the citizens,” – Auditor General Terence Nombembe
This presentation shows what the Auditors Generals office found with regards to Best Practise in terms of the Audit process for Gauteng based Municipalities. It makes for desperate reading. Gauteng is the most capacitated province in the country so it’s frightening that only 21% of municipalities with the province can produce quality financial statements. Presentations for all the provinces can be found here.
One of the first things that have to be in place in any form of organisation is good financial management. Is what is going in municipalities a case of inability to govern properly or unwillingness to govern properly? If municipalities cant keep track of their funds how are they ever going to be able to deal with the backlogs they are mandated to deal with it?
What ever happened to much praised Project Consolidate and its hands on support?
For some reason the chaps at ESKOM and NERSA have forgotten that ESKOM is owned by the citizens of South Africa. What that means is that they are accountable to us.
Well actually that’s not true, especially if one looks at ESKOMS recent misdeeds behaviour. ESKOM does what it wants, when it wants. ESKOM executives choose to focus more on bonuses and just in time coal stock piles and less on the countries well being.
Now ESKOM (with the collusion of NERSA) are hiding what is referred to as “commercially sensitive” details of ESKOMS application for a 53% tariff increase from the public. ESKOM is a public company nothing about its financials should be hidden from its owners.
I would encourage South Africans to fax their complaints to NERSA on (012) 401-4700.
Goolam Ballim, Chief Economist at Standard Bank succintly states the problem we will be faced with should ESKOM’s massive hike be allowed:
There’s going to be multiple effects. Firstly, it is going to raise the general level of inflation in the country, because clearly electricity is a core input into production, not just into consumption in terms of residential living. So it will raise the cost of living and within the broad basket of staple items.