The issue of Waste is becoming more and more pressing in many areas.

For example, four million mobile phones were sold in the UK alone at Christmas 2004, replacing older models and meaning another four million older unfashionable phones were probably no longer used last year, or simply wasted.

Waste occurs when we discard something, without thinking about how it can then be put to further use. At this point, we are failing to see it as a resource – it’s precisely for this reason that waste is on our agenda more than ever before, as we increasingly focus on the re-use and conservation of scarce resources.

Legislation is coming designed to guard on how waste should be managed in a range of different fields, such as the European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE), expected to be introduced in the UK sometime in 2006, which makes producers of consumer electronics responsible for the recycling of electrical goods.

In business, keeping waste to a minimum is guided by similar principles, namely avoiding wasteful practice, e.g. time, efforts and resources on unnecessary work. Wasteful practices have a monetary value, and ultimately a direct effect on the bottom-line. The ability to manage these practices – practices such as eliminating the
replication of work which could have been done right first time, making best use of shared knowledge to save upon extra individual wasted efforts later, or avoiding wasteful business purchases, such as buying that new office PC when last year’s model continues to do the job perfectly – will feed into business success.

Yet unlike these wasteful examples around time, personnel, office supplies and hardware purchases, software development practices within business today has discreetly escaped the glare of wasteful scrutiny – now it deserves a closer inspection.

Feb 06, 07 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Miscellaneous