Saturday, August 13, 2016

CityNext: Trust in a New Age Public Sector...

What if you had the opportunity to establish and design a new city in the United States?  Where would you decide to put it and how would you do it differently than it has ever been done before?

This would be a Public Sector project worth doing differently than we ever have imagined.  After all, how much have we learned by 2016 about critical infrastructure, including electrical grids, solar energy, water resources and waste management?  What about the latest inventions with 5G wireless and how broadband information systems have evolved to satisfy our insatiable appetites for data, entertainment and knowledge working professionals?

How would you design the transportation systems and how would you put the economic and governance factors of the new city into place?  The Urban Planning and CityNext initiatives today are trying to apply many new ideas and thinking to established cities, not just starting from a clean slate if you will.  There might be many discussions on what U.S. State was most suited for the city,  what the size in population and square miles that would encompass housing, commercial development and the social support systems to include health care, public safety and public works.

There are several global livability indexes that exist today and ranking cities by criteria on being the most livable.  Each may put cities such as Melbourne or Zurich,  Boulder or Santa Barbara, Rochester or Bellevue at the top.  This depends on the geographic scope and other criteria to rank cities by all of these particular index factors.

Realizing that there are also so many subjective reasons for wanting to live in an environment near the ocean or the mountains, let us just focus for a minute on all the factors that make the city operate effectively and produce positive economic and governance outcomes for its citizens.  Now how would you design this ideal ecosystem for the future?

If we could do it in such a way that you could replicate the model and the support systems then is it possible that you could put a new city in the middle of some U.S. state and have it flourish over the next 2 decades and beyond?  What factors would we focus on when it comes to how people make a living and sustain their families with a decent standard of living?

All of these considerations and questions are similar whenever you are talking about putting tens, hundreds or thousands of humans together to live, work and play together.  The anthropologists, economists, architects, scientists and doctors would all have their thoughts on what to avoid and how to do it correctly.

So what?  What does any of this have to do with Operational Risk Management (ORM)?

The truth is, that the design of the ideal city, the ideal business, the ideal product or the ideal operations plan, can't evolve and survive without Operational Risk Management:
Operational risk is defined as the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed processes, people, and systems or from external events. These risks are further defined as follows:

* Process risk – breakdown in established processes, failure to follow processes or inadequate process mapping within business lines.

* People risk – management failure, organizational structure or other human failures, which may be exacerbated by poor training, inadequate controls, poor staffing resources, or other factors.

* Systems risk – disruption and outright system failures in both internal and outsourced operations.

* External event risk – natural disasters, terrorism, and vandalism.

The definition includes Legal risk, which is the risk of loss resulting from failure to comply with laws as well as prudent ethical standards and contractual obligations. It also includes the exposure to litigation from all aspects of an institution’s activities.
 
It really does not matter whether it is a single household, an enterprise business or the ideal city.  How much you focus on the "TrustDecisions" that are made each moment of every day, will determine the outcomes of your vision?

Now consider this:
Every transaction creating wealth first requires an affirmative decision to trust.

Building trust creates new wealth. Sustaining trust creates recurring wealth.

Achieving trust superior to your competition achieves market dominance.

Leadership rises (or falls) based on trust (or the absence of trust).


Take a moment and think about each of these with respect to what you do in your business or in your job. How does the organization acquire wealth? Where does new wealth originate? How are customers retained? What provokes them to keep coming back and paying for your goods or services? Why does the leader in your market succeed? If you are not the market leader, why not? How is the loyalty of your team maintained?  Source:  "Achieving Digital Trust" - Jeffrey Ritter
 "Trust is achieved by making decisions that produce favorable outcomes."  These words and more from Jeffrey Ritter should give us pause, as we advance or society and we design new cities.

The truth is, the "Public Sector" needs to create more trusted environments, more trusted transportation, more trusted water supplies, more trusted communications, more trusted safety and security.  The public sector needs systems that use trusted data to fuel all of this and provides continuous Confidentiality, Integrity and Assurance for all of its citizens.

If the public sector can attain these levels of performance, the vast spectrum of knowledge workers will flourish and data driven business models of the future will thrive and they will have new levels of trust.  Trust in their choice on where to live, to work, to raise a family and:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.