The BRCK is a small, lightweight box-shaped modem about the size of a real brick designed for portability. It has been developed by software company Ushahidi and billed as a personal backup generator for the internet.

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) is not new and has been in existence for many decades.  However, the recent recession, increasing legislation, more stringent guidelines and growing stakeholder pressure to prove sustainability and value is elevating the importance of GRC, making it an imperative for any organisation.

 However, leveraging the business benefits of GRC initiatives can prove a challenging task. One of the biggest issues facing organisations is that they are fragmented and broken into silos of information and measurement, preventing a holistic view of activities across the organisation.

 The lack of a common framework results in information that is of little to no value in driving performance. To realise the business benefits of GRC, it is vital to break these silos down, creating an integrated view of GRC activities which delivers actionable intelligence, allowing for greater control and enhanced performance.

 Risk and risk management are components within GRC activities. Addressing risk is sound governance and compliance is adherence to various laws and regulations.

Most businesses understand this, however, the problem remains that organisations are fragmented and operate in silos such as finance, IT, operations and so on.

Each of these departments has their own risk and associated measurements and processes.  This creates a fragmented view of the organisation, since no two areas are measured against the same criteria.

It also creates a challenge for organisations to understand the correlations between risk in different areas. Put simply, if there is a threat or risk in one area, it can affect other aspects of the business. This lack of cohesion lowers the effectiveness of risk management and as a result, of governance and compliance too.

 The challenge is to develop an integrated view of risk across the entire organisation, which requires these silos be broken down.

GRC as a practice needs to be driven and accountable from a board level and filter down throughout the organisation, to ensure that the entire business is managing risk effectively, producing the right value to stakeholders, delivering a sustainable bottom line and meeting the requirements of external compliance criteria. A common framework or standard for measurement is required which all areas need to adhere to.

ISO standards have been designed specifically for this purpose, allowing businesses to ‘compare apples with apples’ so to speak, by creating common measurements that ensure organisations are following the right processes for the right reason.

 Complying with ISO standards is an effective way of harnessing various areas of business together, breaking down silos across an organisation and offering an integrated view of the overall impact of risk, compliance breaches and so on.

 Examples of such auditable standards in ICT to underpin GRC are; ISO27001 which is the international standard describing best practice for an Information Security Management System and ISO/IEC 20000 the international standard for IT Service Management.

 Measurement of risk in silos and isolation to the rest of the business hinders a company’s ability to add value, as this knowledge cannot be used to drive performance.

 However, implementing a common framework for measurement and improvement across the organisation ensures that all areas are measured to a common standard, offering better control and enhanced performance management, for improved GRC activities. 

 Marval South Africa specialises in the design and implementation of Service Management solutions supporting IT Governance. Our integrated approach of education, coaching, consulting and software solutions creates business value through Service Improvement Programmes.

For more information on the training courses provided by Marval SA, visit www.marvalsa.net

Sustainability reporting generally refers to all the non-financial information organisations should include in their annual financial reports, which encompasses economic, social responsibility, environmental performance and corporate governance. It brings together benchmarks and strategies to ensure best performance related to businesses, the environment and society.

 In fact, in tough economic times, stakeholders are demanding full disclosure of business operations to provide strategic direction that will ensure the long-term viability of business in today's ever-changing business landscape. However, compiling corporate reports is a highly pressurised, deadline driven environment which creates a lot of stress within any organisation.

 To streamline the complicated processes, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has introduced standards for sustainability reporting, and thousands of companies across various countries subscribe to them. Many more are to follow as the true benefits of sustainability become more apparent.

 While sustainability reporting is not mandatory for non-listed companies, it is today considered to be the best practice methodology and in South Africa it is increasingly becoming a determining factor when corporates are selecting tenders or looking for potential mergers and acquisitions.

 Locally, the South African Integrated Reporting Committee, together with the JSE, have developed a local flavour of GRI's standards, incorporating XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language, a universal financial reporting business language to drive an open global standard for business reporting. XBRL delivers many benefits and will most likely be released by 2015 as the de facto reporting standard due to its high usability.

 However, this increases the complexity of compiling accurate reports dramatically, with companies having to collate the structured and unstructured information from different sources in disparate systems throughout their enterprises in a prescribed format.

It is a time consuming process, requiring many high-level resources to collectively gather, compile and verify the information buried deep in applications, spreadsheets and word processor documents. As useful as these productivity tools are, they are designed for individual use and not in a collaborative environment which focuses on one version of the truth of critical non-financial and financial data.

 These reporting processes also provide little visibility into how edits are tracked and how approvals are made. Additionally, while finance professionals are very familiar with generating reports, assembling them into a highly accessible, informative and attractive document is quite another matter.

 If South African organisations want to be part of the global financial world, the only way to ease the burden of reporting is by automating financial and sustainability reporting processes as a whole through the use of technology.

 Today, there is software available that provides a secure environment involving multiple participants with different roles and responsibilities within an organisation to collaborate and assemble sustainability reports in a controlled and accurate fashion in line with King III guidelines.

It not only reduces the duplication of information, but has strict checks and balances in place to ensure compliance and eases the burden of the accounting and auditing process.

Importantly, through workflow processes that link the co-workers to each other and their responsibility in the process, leads to massive productivity gains and accelerated reporting time frames.

 In closing, these reporting tools have literally transformed “triple bottom line” reporting, turning a complex, sometimes badly co-ordinated and error prone process into a more organised, controlled and credible fashion.

 It frees up key staff to focus on important areas of the business, rather than being bogged down in hunting and verifying information.

 Importantly, the whole collaborative process translates into insightful reports which allow top management and stakeholders to analyse and aggregate their sustainability figures to keep their fingers on the pulse.

Most of all, if growing organisations in South Africa do not join the sustainability debate, it will impact their bottom line, as well as their impact on the environment and the social conditions around them.

For more information, visit www.cortell.co.za

Written by Nigel Baker, Chief Executive of Thomson Foundation (pictured below)

An unlikely alliance has been created to safeguard the best use of Africa’s growing wealth. Economists and journalists are joining forces to help promote wise spending and good governance.

The idea was the brainchild of Paul Collier, a development economist at Oxford University, and author of “The Bottom Billion”, which outlines how discovering natural resources can paradoxically trap a country in poverty by making its other industries less competitive, or make governments less accountable if they have a reduced need to levy taxes.

Professor Collier says economists need to learn from journalists how to get such messages across in order to ensure the benefits of natural resources are not squandered.

“Financial journalism and economic reporting is important because you can’t leave it to the academic economists. We’ll mess it up,” says the professor.

“And yet ordinary citizens have to get up to speed on these issues. Think: Africa is discovering natural resources at a rate of knots. Forty years ago, Sierra Leone and Botswana had diamonds. Sierra Leone went to the bottom of the world’s human development index. Botswana became the fastest became growing economy in the world and is now among the richest economies in Africa (by GDP per capita). That is what is at stake now. Is the next decade going to drive all Africa to repeat Sierra Leone or can all Africa become Botswana? It depends what citizens understand, and that depends what journalists themselves understand and communicate.”

The idea has been put into practice with a project called Africa Means Business (AMB) – initially bringing together more than 60 economists and journalists in Kenya and Ghana – but hoping to spread Africa-wide. Far from being a one-way street, journalists are learning how to turn complex economic data into stories of interest to the general public, as well as economists learning how to communicate more clearly in the mass media.

AMB is a partnership of Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, the African Economic Research Consortium, the Wincott Foundation (connected to the Financial Times) and is run by the Thomson Foundation – a UK media-development organisation. The training is carried out at Strathmore Business School in Kenya and at the University of Ghana, Legon – where participants learn from experienced academic economists and financial journalists as well as each other. The project has initially been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The second cohorts of eight journalists and eight economists in both Ghana and Kenya are getting underway this summer, while the results of last year’s cohorts are becoming apparent.

The economists questioned after the first year’s training unanimously said that they found presenting data easier, and that promoting economic research in the media had become more important in their institutions. Meanwhile, the journalists questioned said they all found analysing economic data easier with two thirds covering economic issues more frequently. It also means the economists are in regular contact with journalists and vice versa, developing collaboration that will continue after the lifetime of the project.

Chaacha Mwita, Thomson Foundation’s project director, based in Nairobi, says the most important aim of the project is informing policy and action in Africa by economists and journalists working together and communicating their findings. “It will ensure the policy-making process in Africa is not devoid of rigorous debate on economic issues, and most importantly, is not devoid of evidence,” he says.

One of the early success stories was with Dr Abraham Waithima, a senior lecturer in economics at Nairobi’s Daystar University, who had an opinion piece published in Kenya’s Nation newspaper about how corruption was depleting resources like common grazing land and water.

But it was his second attempt. Before doing the AMB course the article was rejected – though he wasn’t sure why. After the course he rewrote the article. “I’m glad to report that the article was accepted once I knew what media people looked for or how they want to communicate to their audience.”

The course inspired Edith Fortunate, a reporter on The Nation, to write an in-depth feature on examining how population growth can damage economic stability. She emerged from the course confident to assess whether a person was using economic data purely to push their own agenda, or whether they were telling the truth.

“I came out a different person. I knew how to translate economics into a story that anyone in the country – not just economists - could read, enjoy and understand.”

The story is repeated in Ghana where DeodatAdenutsi, a senior lecturer at Central University College, Accra, says the programme enabled him to establish good working relationships with journalists. “Anytime I come out with research articles I can liaise with them and make sure these findings are well circulated to cover a lot of people and influence policy making in Ghana.”

Paul Collier hopes there will be more like Deodat. “Economists are really bad at communicating. They’ve got worse. Try reading some technical economics – it’s gobbledegook. But the job of communicating to ordinary people comes as second nature to journalists. So journalists have got to engage with economists so that THEY can get on top of the ideas and then they can express them.”

A number of leading experts are lined up in the June issue  of African Business Review to impart their pearls of wisdom on a range of must-read topics.

To kick off we have the University of Cape Town’s professor, Ralph Hamann, who explains why there are not many large companies today who do not operate a comprehensive corporate social responsibility programme, they could achieve far better results. He says a lot more could be done to benefit both communities and companies if businesses leaders stuck their heads above the parapet and pulled together and pooled ideas on solving some of the more critical issues.

This month we also have the expertise of the CRF Institute’s Samantha Crous who tells us why social media is increasingly being used by companies not just to add value to customer services but also to improve communication with staff.  Plus Chris Hathaway a director of the leading software solutions company Soarsoft explains what the advantages are of becoming a preferred Binary Tree distribution partner – one of Microsoft’s leading providers of messaging and collaboration transformation technology and solutions’ platforms.

Finally, two top advisors at Ernst & Young have put their heads together to come up with an exclusive article for African Business Review highlighting the seven crucial steps companies need to make procurement strategies more cost effective.

To read the June issue of African Business Review click here