On the Rocks? What a Shipwreck can teach us

The plight of the ill-fated Costa Concordia (pictured) is by now well known.  How someone could navigate as 114,000 ton company asset on to the rocks in a sea of calm is quite mind boggling. 

Equally impressive, but in a more positive vein, are the logistics of salvaging the huge liner. The assembly of cranes, experts and tons of concrete as well as the professional expertise needed to right the ship.  

The marshalling of assets is something all companies face albeit rarely on the scale of a liner salvage or in the face of such a human disaster.  But it is not uncommon for poor asset management within an enterprise to figuratively and quite literally 'sink the ship'. 

 If you are relying on spreadsheets to manage allocation and asset redundancy then you face the likelihood of following the fate of the Concordia, being left high and dry while others go about their business in a successful fashion. 

A recent article in Business Day came to the conclusion that if an enterprise is aiming for service, performance and financial improvement it needs to devise a good asset management strategy.

"Every asset needs to be managed and maintained to ensure it functions within the design parameters". 

 "The operational phase of an asset is the most useful period of its life and this is when the asset is managed and used to deliver services to support the core business of an organisation." 

Allocating,  tracking and monitoring physical asset depreciation all all key elements in the success of any business.  Being fully aware of the life-cycle of any asset is important.  It is no good waiting for a financial shortfall or the sudden realisation of an assets age to prompt action on asset management.  

Whole-life asset management is the name of the game if you hope to get the best out of your investment. 

The advance of technology also means that the assets you have invested in today will not necessarily be the assets you need tomorrow.  Consider for example, how data centres and company IT departments  full of server hardware have been largely superseded by server virtualization, which in turn made infrastructure clouds possible. 

The Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE) provide a very good guide on realising a world class infrastructure and the guiding principles of asset management.  In looking at the future they identified the following challenges:

• Adapting your assets to climate change given the impact that this having and will have in the future
• Social change with different demographics and the way we will interact with our infrastructure
• Economic challenges of asset maintenance, made more difficult when world economies are sluggish
• Critical skills shortages to manage and maintain older technologies and assets
• Political inability to foresee the need for infrastructure provision and the impact that will have on society
• New uses of technology which for some will be a challenge but is also an opportunity to overcome ineffective data capture and knowledge management.

So investment in a good asset management system has become a must to keep your business ship on a  true course

I Share Therefore I Am

This video presents a hypothesis that I don't entirely agree with, but does touch on the sociological implications of social media at the expense of "real" relationships.

There is little doubt that there are those who hide behind online persona rather than facing the trials and tribulations of the 'real world'. But equally there are others who use social media to advantage; expanding their already formed networks and staying in touch with old friends.

Credit: Keisuke Jinushi

Some sad cases who have very few friends have to pretend that they do, to keep up with the small circle that they actually have.  

Not that I am recommending taking this course of action to the extremes of the Japanese photographer (right), who faked a romantic attachment by using Instagram, a smartphone and dollop of nail polish!

A sad lad maybe but I guess he was really just making a point.  See his full account here and turn on Google's translation if you can't read Japanese.

Apparently overuse of Facebook can be totally depressing.  A study by  the University of Michigan over a two week period resulted in Facebook participants  experiencing a darkening of mood the more they browsed the social medium.  The sample of 82 college-aged volunteers was large enough to get a reasonable result.  As media has reported, this is the core demographic among Facebook's nearly 700 million active daily users.

University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross said: “Loneliness predicted Facebook use, and loneliness also predicted how bad people felt. But the effect of Facebook on how people felt was independent of loneliness.”

So what may you well ask is causing this sinking feeling after excessive exposure to Facebook? 

According to The Economist the University of Michigan study didn't really address the differences between socialising on Facebook and socialising in person.  The paper  suggests the answer to social media depression is  one of green-eyed envy.

"An earlier investigation, conducted by social scientists at Humboldt University and Darmstadt’s Technical University, both in Germany, may have found the root cause. These researchers found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. Endlessly comparing themselves with peers who have doctored their photographs, amplified their achievements and plagiarised their bons mots can leave Facebook’s users more than a little green-eyed. Real-life encounters, by contrast, are more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)".

One wonders if reading blogs on a regular basis has the same effect?  I suspect not, but to play it safe I will think twice about promoting this post on Facebook - it might be too depressing to contemplate!

Related articles

• Facebook Is Bad For You: Get A Life!
• Facebook use 'undermines well-being'