Recycling engineers
With the ever-present mantra of 'skills shortages' perhaps we should take a leaf, if you will excuse the pun, from the green environment movement. The essence of this movement's philosophy is: do not waste precious resources and do not pollute, but rather use sparingly and carefully recycle what is used.
In technology we can work smart such that we too do not waste our precious resources (engineers, technicians and skilled man hours) but rather use them sparingly. When we do use these resources, it should be in such a way that their output is reusable.
These are some of the enabling technologies for this engineering approach:
* Object Oriented Programming (OOP) where objects are re-usable, modular, inheritable, encapsulated and polymorphic so that engineering effort is re-usable and builds intellectual property (IP) value within the organisation.
* Object-relational databases for the storage and retrieval of such objects and their data for multiple end users, thus providing the value-adding benefits of the IP across the enterprise from a central data store.
* Microsoft .NET Framework technology for application interoperability, language independence and portability.
* Extensible Markup Language (XML) for document and data storage and transport to facilitate the presentation, sharing and consolidation of content from differently formatted documents and other data sources in many different ways.
* XML databases for the native storage of the data in XML documents.
Strategic managers and engineers looking to extend their marketability could do worse than obtaining an insight into and a working knowledge of these technologies which may make the difference between successfully competing against low-labour-cost economies and our own economy.
Politics and prosperity
As this column is being written, at the beginning of January 2008, the international news headlines are darkened by stories of violent and warlike political activity in so many parts of the world. In North Korea there are threats of nuclear programme escalation. In Pakistan the fallout from the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto continues to weigh on election plans. In Turkey a car bomb, triggered by suspected Kurdish terrorists, has killed four and injured around 70 others. On the African continent, in Mauritania, there have been recent killings of French tourists. In a separate incident an attack on a military base resulted in the death of three soldiers. Closer to home, in Kenya, opposing factions are at war over the suspect results of December's general elections and there are indications that the unrest is triggering genocide. In Port Harcort, Nigeria, some criminal elements attacked two police stations and a hotel leaving at least 13 people dead.
Even when such events occur on the other side of the world they have an economic impact here in South Africa. They increase the likelihood of investment funds moving from developing economies to more stable economies. The impact of that is a weakening of the currencies of developing economies, making imports more expensive and generating lower revenue for exports. They also feed the speculation activities of hedge funds in investing in oil and gold futures instruments and tighten the oil supply market. The negative impact of that is increasing fuel prices which then impact on inflation. We have recently seen crude pass the US$100 per barrel mark and there are signs that it could run higher still as Nigerian, Venezuelan and Iraqi shipments are down. Unrest also drastically reduces inbound tourism to and consequent foreign exchange earnings of affected countries. The fate of this year's Dakar Rally is in the balance. The economic impact of such a cancellation on the economies in North Africa will be massive.
Against this rather bleak backdrop South Africa is experiencing steady GDP growth of above 4% with significant infrastructural spending and high levels of investment in mining and mineral processing being supported by strong commodity prices. Some economists feel that interest rates and inflation have now peaked. This is good news for our economy and for the control and instrumentation market.
There are significant changes in the offing in the South African political landscape. Our leaders need to remain vigilant in ensuring that they do not give investors cause to abandon South Africa for pastures greener.
Andrew Ashton
Features editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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