Editorial
Clearly, as a major international journal we value the new and the novel… though we often judge it against history and tradition. The truly novel often involves an element of surprise – it is more than an evolution of ideas; it involves that creative spark which represents true innovative thinking.
Technology can still surprise – not the technology itself as such, but the ways in which innovative and enterprising humans discover new ways to use it. Someone in Australia (I think) has developed a prototype of a “virtual field”. Cattle are not fenced in (fencing is expensive to set up –and maintain). Each wears a GPS receiver. The farmer sets the co-ordinates for“the field” (the area in which the cattle are allowed to wander) and when a cow gets within five metres of the invisible boundary, the device emits a hum which warns the cow. If the cow strays the five metres further they get a mild shock (as they would from a conventional electric fence). Research shows that within a few days – and presumably a few shocks – the cows learn to “back off” when they hear the hum. Now, that’s innovation – the technology has been around for a while but someone has exploited it in a novel way!
We expect our authors to look at issues in novel ways. Sometimes this happens when a “critical mass” of information and research has been built up and an individual or team suddenly spots (usually after diligent hard work)something that no-one has seen before. This is why we often return to paths well trodden and subjects well covered – to seek out the new thinking.
Benchmarking seems to be attracting renewed interest. Many of us are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of typical performance benchmarking, but it is an area that perhaps has not been subjected to rigorous research. In this issue, we show that this is being addressed. Hopefully this research will filter through into improved benchmarking schemes in the future … which we would like to see represented in our Reflective Practice section of the journal.
The first paper looks at the nature of benchmarking programmes according to the sector involved, setting a general context for the fourth paper, which specifically looks at the textiles sector.
We also have a “brace” of papers looking at performance measurement systems, adding to our ability to classify, differentiate and understand.
Our final paper again uses the now seemingly fashionable (or is it just useful?) technique of data envelope analysis – this time applied to the banking sector.
Obviously lessons emerge from these papers. We are not going to raise them here – that is for you to glean after careful reading and after the author has pointed you in the right direction) – but lessons there are.
To give you a “bonus lesson” – and square the technology circle we started this editorial with – we read a web site the other day where someone was suggesting that personal and small office productivity could be improved by using … index cards. We could not agree more that often“low technology” is the best solution … and certainly index cards work well for small “databases”. Let’s hear it for older,battery-free technologies still serving a useful purpose. Perhaps we should start an awards ceremony!
Zoe Radnor and John Heap
