Friday, February 12, 2010

Focus on community

Community Analytics (CA) has a focus on the community. The reason for this is that it is at the community level that quality of life is experienced in practice. When problems are allowed to persist at the community level, then the quality of life is compromised.

Most economic performance metrics have a focus on the organization, the capital markets or the macro-economic indicators. There are very detailed statistics based on these metrics ... but these are only useful in the context of wealth management and the money profit dimension of the economy. The quality of life and socio-economic progress are not accounted for in these performance metrics.

By acquiring data about critical aspects of a community and its socio-economic situation ... and the socio-economic activities that are taking place in the community ... it becomes possible to understand cause and effect in this community and plan to progress. The priorities should be in the best interest of the community.

CA value chain analysis may be used to show how much of value being created in the community stays with the community and how much is removed from the community. In many situations, in exchange for a few jobs for a few years, a community has a huge amount of irreplaceable natural resources removed and oftentimes a residual environmental pollution that cannot be remediated except at unaffordably high cost.

Community is where people live and people work. Good decisions for the community can improve the quality of life. Every community is different ... so an optimum program is going to be one that is best suits each individual community.

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