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Mumbai's 8/11 presents challenges of co-ordinated security

Mumbai's 8/11 is emblematic of a lack of security co-ordination across city, national and private sector organisations. Jyoti Banerjee examines the lessons that the West can learn from Mumbai's 8/11.

Mumbai’s terror attacks at the end of November have created a deep sense of sadness and loss among Indians everywhere. The pictures on TV screens showing casually-dressed young men casually spreading violence and death have been more upsetting than the anonymous bomb blasts that have characterised terrorist attacks in India till now. More than ever, it is possible to reflect on the continuing truth in Barack Obama’s words, spoken about the New York terrorists in 2001: "My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with such abstract, serene satisfaction."

But there is also a growing resolve across the country that India should not be such a soft target for terrorist action. It certainly seems to lack any sort of co-ordinated structure or system that can deal with credible threats and prosecute them with any urgency. Security agencies around the world are already competing for bragging rights regarding who was first to inform the Indians that a sea-borne attack on Mumbai was imminent.

Do we need the RDAs?

The Taxpayers' Alliance would like the regional development agencies abolished. Jyoti Banerjee studies their report - he likes their data but disagrees with their recommendation.

This month a report from the TaxPayers’ Alliance claims that the £15 billion spent on the Regional Development Agencies since their creation in 1999 has been a total waste as the RDAs have contributed absolutely nothing to the economic performance of the regions in the UK.

The TPA report has three main planks of evidence:
1) The RDAs were created to improve the performance of the regions, particularly those outside London and the south-east. In 1992, London and the south-east contributed 36% of the UK economy, a figure that has grown (in the wrong direction) to 48% in 2006.
2) Employment across the country grew by 9.5% between 1995 and 2000, while it only grew by 3% between 2000 and 2005.
3) Regional inequality worsened: apart from London and the south-east, England’s regions grew faster before the RDAs were around, compared to the seven years after.

To add to this lack of performance is a long account of RDA waste. For example, 39 RDA bureaucrats earn over £100,000 a year, one part-time RDA chairman had a travel expense bill of over £50,000 in a single year, and one RDA managed to spend £20,000 sending some of their team to a film festival in Dubai.

Medium enterprise and the low-carbon economy

Climate change, whether you believe in it or not, is going to change every business on the planet, either by force of regulation, or by a competitive drive towards low-carbon business models. Medium enterprises have a great opportunity to be the next generation of big winners in a future low-carbon economy. Or big losers. Jyoti Banerjee investigates the balance of probability.

Last week BBC Radio 4 featured an interview with a Canadian academic who has developed a prosthetic knee that generates electricity every time the knee flexes. It’s a great idea for helping provide power to disabled people but it turns out that there are other applications as well. The military could generate electricity for their communications devices while walking. And the rest of us could walk around to power up our iPods, mobiles and GPS units.

Walking to generate electricity is not going to turn back the tide on climate change but it is just one more example of the way clean-technology approaches are gaining traction in the market.

Medium enterprises are probably as concerned as everybody else about climate change but many executives of such organisations that I have met wonder what they can do to really make a difference. After all, the industries that have to make the biggest changes to their carbon productivity, such as energy, transport and heavy industry, are usually not populated with medium enterprises. Executives in medium enterprises agonise over installing efficient heating, or motion sensors to switch lighting in less-used locations like toilets because they know that these things make good business sense anyway, but surely none of these are going to tackle the problem of climate change.

Perceptive processes - making sense of business as-it-will-be

Businesses are getting better and better at providing technology to support "doing" processes. But what happens when managers need to undertake "thinking" processes, asks Jyoti Banerjee? In answering the question, Jyoti proposes that we recognise a distinct group of business processes that he calls perceptive processes.

There are many different kinds of processes in an organisation. Traditionally, processes have been divided into two categories: transactional or non-transactional. Although that is helpful in terms of identifying which processes need to dealt with by computerised transaction-processing systems, the distinction seems incomplete in an era when almost all processes can be handled by computers.

It is still useful, though, to distinguish between different types of processes. This paper suggests that all kinds of processes in an organisation may be categorised into two different types:
* Learned processes
* Perceptive processes

These two modes of processes are rather analogous to the distinction that psychologists make between experiential cognition and reflective cognition in human thinking. To put it differently, this categorisation separates "doing"€processes from "thinking" processes.

Modernising business processes

Formalising what may previously have been ad-hoc business processes is a key issue when differentiating medium-sized organisations from small ones. Yet figuring out which processes need to be formalised or modernised, and in what priority, is a difficult task for leaders of medium organisations. Jyoti Banerjee checks out the options.

Processes new and old
Companies that want to exercise a competitive edge in the market, whether by launching an e-commerce channel or being first to market with a new product, have found that they are dependent on the state of their business processes if they want to succeed. Typically, their business processes are a mix of new and old, with only brand-new well-financed companies having the luxury of fully modern processes. Good processes do not guarantee success, though bad processes will certainly guarantee failure.

Great business processes drive up customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. They enable a business to scale up and drive costs down. The challenge for managers of medium businesses is assessing which processes are broken and which ones should be fixed first.

The Enterprise 2007 study by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), an M Institute partner, found that 71% of all British companies in their survey were intending to improve their IT systems, as a significant financial objective of the business. A European study found that 56% of the companies that introduced new processes ended up introducing processes that were new to the market.

Why do business processes, and their related technologies, need to change anyway?