This is important -if you have data, there is a risk that you will lose it. And that loss may be catastrophic for your business.

I remember very early in my computer using days being told that “she who does not back up shall be sorry”  Oh how true and it applies to he as well as she!

I heard of story last week about a  client approaching an IT person after a disaster – caused by poor IT systems set up – removed 13 YEARS of business data from the server and “backup” system.

You do need a real back up to a separate piece of media and removed offsite so that fire or burglary cannot lose the back up as well as the original

Some years ago my family owned a computer business and one of our clients had backed up from one computer to another – then one night both were stolen.

I have just had a major IT meltdown in my business,
•    First the laptop needed a new motherboard and was out of action for two weeks
•    Then the server stated hanging – oh dear – I had been budgeting for that as I knew its age and it was definitely past the recommended use by date.

Thank fully the backups had all worked and my new server duly arrived and I accessed my date from an external drive and as it was holidays, there was no one but me wanting to access the network  This was able to be backed up easily because my tech has copied the server setup, not just the data so that it was easier to rebuild the new server.
•    Then two days after the server was commissioned, my desktop computer froze irretrievable.  The technical term used by the IT man was that it “shat itself and cooked the hard drive at the same time”.
•    Bother.

I back up my outlook regularly to the server and have no data on hard drives other than what I need to travel on my laptop so data was not an issue  I had no idea however that all three could go down within one month.

I have a good backup system and have just updated from tapes to removable drives.  They go offsite.  I also burn a series of DVDs of my data so that I have multiple copies in case of disaster.  But what a palaver and expense

I also have good virus software and firewall

Do You?

Part of any good business system, even for a micro business, is making sure that your data is secure.
Looking at records and data management is one part any good management system.  ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 help you formalise your record and data management

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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I read this stat  today.  And believe it or not we are now building huge desalination plants so that we can burn fossil fuels in order to desalinate more water to go down the toilet!

And when you save water you also save energy, because water requires enormous amounts of energy to pump around the country and to dispose of.

In Hong Kong at least part of the city toilets are on a separate, unfiltered water supply.

Why can’t we use treated grey-water for toilet flushing?  It is legal in some places but not others.
There are some effective treatment systems for the grey water, because stored grey water can build up a high bacterial content.

Dual flush toilet cisterns have been around for many years but are still not universal.

Some places use stored rainwater to run the toilets and washing machine.

Coming from Adelaide, at the bottom end of the Murray, I treasure rainwater for drinking and bathing as Murray water causes my skin to get bad excema.

Clearly there needs to be clean gutters and sealed tanks that have the bottom 15 cms or so pumped out each year but there are increasing numbers of effective gutting solutions available now.  And some industrial areas may be unsuitable for rainwater collection for drinking.

I have twice lived in places with no water supply other than collected rain water and that is by far my favourite water resource.

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Is it Sustainable?  Do you know?  Have you ever wondered how long can we continue polluting the atmosphere, the rivers, sea and soils?  Plus continue to use and throw away resources without something getting out of balance?

How long can we continue business as usual?

Are you wondering how the current political debate/standoff is actually affecting this?

The question should not be which climate scheme but what is the best plan we can come up with for Australia and we certainly have not got this yet.

I would love to see a mix of both these schemes with incentives plus a price for excessive waste because I do think that carrots generally work better than sticks.   I would rather see people working out how to minimise a problem that how to get around the issue with red tape patches.

So where do you think your business should go from here?

Environmental sustainability part of whole of business sustainability and it is about identifying and managing all your environmental risks, then building a simple system with feedback so that you can continue to mage these risks effectively.

It is certainly not about spending lots of money so that you harm your financial sustainability and its not about removing all your environmental risks because this is often not possible – it is about managing them

Environmental sustainability requires a degree of pragmatism because the world is not going to be a perfect place

My suggestion is that ISO 14001 is a great tool to help you build environmental sustainability into your business and it is very easily integrated with your existing systems and other needs like quality (customer satisfaction mainly) and safety.

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Last week I said that employers need clear company policies where you also set up dress codes if needed, smoking guidelines, email, “foreign” software, internet browsing, phone, mobile and texting guidelines …etc so that the ground rules are clear and you have no need to be either heavy handed or exploited

So did we get an example of this on TV this week!

A Macquarie Group employee was caught looking at pictures of supermodel Miranda Kerr during a live cross to the trading room during a Seven Network news bulletin.  Everyone watching that news bulletin was watching Miranda!

Workplace lawyer Peter Vitale of CCI Lawyers says the case could provide all employers with the chance to remind workers of email and internet usage policies.

Sure, we don’t all appear on live television on a regular basis but all offices have visitors such as clients, contractors, couriers and board members walking through every day who could be embarrassed or worse.

Certainly when one guy who was working for me left, I had his work email diverted so that we picked up client and prospect calls but over half the emails that came were jokes with sexual innuendos or straight porn.  I had spoken to him about wasting a lot of time on emails and the net but that was completely unacceptable on a computer that I owned and with an internet policy in place.  It pays to do random checks.

Miranda Kerr emphasised the need for clear and enforced workplace policies to manage email and internet use as will as big range of other ground rules.

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Things can change in a minute in life and in business.  This is the anniversary of Victoria’s terrible fires and Landline was showing some of the flow on effects on a variety of affected businesses.  There are the obvious things but also things you do not easily think of like higher water temperatures in the creeks that no longer had cool water running through shaded forest.  This had an ongoing effective of killing trout in fish farms.

I am chairing the climate change session at the Australasian Aquaculture Conference and finding the right speakers to present a sensible program that will help people be prepared for the changes that may happen.

The interesting thing is that many emergencies can come out of left field with no warning.  It may be weather, storms, fire or floods or it may be financial crises that predominantly come form overseas; it may be sudden and unexpected illness of  a key person, or major failure of a power supply like the one that crippled Auckland 10-12 years ago.

If you had a catastrophe hit your business, would you be ready?  Do you have everyone working together as a team?  Do you have effective emergency planning? Do you have systems that can kick in to take of the workload of a key person?

Effective management systems help your business to be ready to cope with whatever eventuates and even avoid it in some cases.

Would you be open to discuss how the help I have been giving businesses like yours for the last 12 years will also help you?

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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It was interesting listening to True Energy’s Managing Director in the ABC this morning.  OK I know he has an exe to grind but he is one of those best qualified to comment on energy generation.

His opinion is that the proposed ETS/CPRS is very expensive and inefficient.

He said that eventually the world would move forward to some form of emission trading or carbon price but he felt that direct action would be more cost effective.

He stated that natural gas power generation is far more environmentally sustainable because it gives a 75% reduction in greenhouse emissions over brown coal generation but when power plants still have a 20 year life span it is hard to justify closing them and paying for completely new plants without some form of subsidy.

I with that both sides of the political divide could at least take the sensible stand of banning all new coal generation plants immediately so that we don’t have an even greater time lag of replacing coal with gas.

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Most of these are nothing to do with the environment or management systems and are breaking my rules about political comment.
•    Barnaby Joyce saying that the Government’s insulation scheme was a useless waste of money when it is actually a really sensible way to reduce energy use in houses and save people money as well as helping the environment.
•    I am totally tired of hearing about Tony Abbot’s competition bathers.  Here is the busy leader of the opposition who still makes time to support his local surf club – one of the truly great Australian Volunteer organisations.
Interestingly I just watched part of the Iron Man competition whey the guys wore the same racing swim wear and not one was fussed about them.  I used to swim competitively and I simply cannot imagine trying to race with a lot of unnecessary baggy shorts flapping around my legs.
•    I am also tired of hearing about “rabble” vs word perfect scripts – what nonsense.  I want to be represented by Politicians who think for themselves.
•    Personal attacks on people – there is no place for this!  I think Lord Monkton, for example, talks a lot of drivel but there is no excuse to focus on his eye condition which is the result of a medical problem.  That is totally inappropriate.
•    Because I live in South Australia we have censorship over all political comment until after the next state election so to be legal, my name is Jean Cannon and my postcode is 5067.  What nonsense.

I would love to see rational debate and discussion between our political leaders to sort out the best way to meet the challenges we all face.

If people behaved like politicians do in a business, it would simply go broke.  Is this something that they are doing to us?

So why am I telling you this?  Well it is partly because like many of you I sometimes want to get something off my chest  …

BUT mainly because Parliament is highlighting the problems people sometimes have managing organisations.  Australia is a large organisation and when we look at the management, it really does leave a bit to be desired.

Effective business management identifies problems and sets objectives which will control these most effectively.  AND effective businesses takes account of individual differences and skill sets and get everyone on board to pull together as a team.

What a challenge it would be to put a sensible management system into Parliament!

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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When soil is not fertilised using superphosphate, which kills earthworms, they do a wonderful job aerating the soil and increasing carbon storage in soils.

This post is an add-on to” its all about pollution” where I discussed the impact of chemical fertilisers.

This will be more important if farmers end up being paid to store carbon in soil as suggested by the Coalition in Australia.

We need our earthworms in both our home gardens and in agriculture.

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Now we can hopefully begin to have the debate that we need on greenhouse emission policy.

The Coalition have released their version and I have copied their major bullet points for you and a link to the rest.

Major features of the Coalition’s direct action plan include:
o    An Emissions Reduction Fund to provide direct incentives to industry and farmers to reduce CO2 emissions;
o    CO2 abatement through soil carbons;
o    A range of measures to support the increased uptake and use of renewable energy in homes and communities, including a $1000 rebate for either solar panels or solar hot water systems; and
o    The planting of an additional 20 million trees by 2020 to re-establish urban forests and green corridors.

You can read more about  their plan for direct action on the environment and climate change here.

I am not pushing either view as I try to stay out of expressing political opinion.

I simply want a debate to happen and an informed voting public not simply the same old, same old that I believe has fundamental flaws.

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Environmentally friendly practices are currently one of the biggest issues in many businesses, not only because of public demand, but also because there are important savings to be had in the long-run.

Not so long ago environmentally sustainable practices were considered an expensive fad.   Now increasing numbers of businesses want to obtain the much sought-after environmental certificate, ISO 14001.

Consumers are now wanting to know about a business’s environmental track record and what was once viewed as a waste of money is actually generating important saving

Europe is ahead of the Australia and North America but these consumers are becoming increasingly more likely to be environmentally sustainable and this can be seen in the increasing number of certifications.

This is increasingly the case for example in the hotel industry and while many hotels still have the perfunctory use of towel notice and keys that turn off the power, many international hotels are now ISO 14001 certified because this is what their aware clients are demanding.  The story is the same in many other industries.

ISO 14001 is surprisingly easy for a small to medium business to obtain if you use a Consultant/trainer who deeply understands both management systems (and the environment) and how small business operates which is so different to the big end of town.  You can find help to implement ISO 14001 and other ISO systems.

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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