No, of course governments usually don’t grow plants…. But still it needs to be on our public sector monitor. But why?
The first point is very easy to understand: at the central government level the Ministries for Agriculture cross EMEA ( and probably globally ) are the public bodies which distribute the largest grants – in comparison to their peers. So apparently there are core processes of such organizations that can immediately be addressed by us.
The second point is even easier to understand: a Ministry for Agriculture is an organization - and as every other organization they need to manage their resources as excellent as possible. They are confronted with all the challenges – doing more with less etc. – as their peers.
Which leads us to point three: point one and two cannot be the central issue of this blog.
What I would like to talk about is the real stuff. In many countries – in particular in Africa and also in other emerging countries – agriculture is seen as absolutely vital to the development of the country’s economy, to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, to fight poverty, to increase the health level, etc.. You can check the government programs of such countries, you will always find these points. And although the agricultural business is not the government business, the government are willing and ready to support especially the smallholder and subsistence farmers ( and often also the fisheries and forestry ) – also by taking over tasks usually taken over by private industries.
And exactly at this point it becomes interesting for us: it is not only the fact that we have a special industry solution for agriculture – and also many partners also providing core or “mission critical” process solutions for this area. ( Although you can immediately recognize that if a state partly takes over responsibility for more efficient and effective farming such solutions must be of interest to them too. ) Additionally let us have a look at our ‘innovations’ that can be extremely useful if the target is developing a country’s agriculture: mobile, HANA, cloud, analytics... You might not have noticed yet: but the success of these technologies in our target area ‘agri’ has been proven. In the following blogs you will learn more.
But just let us think about use cases for these innovations:
Analytics and Performance Management | A topic of very high interest to public organizations because needed transparency in their government programs, showing clear achievements and success. Also for decision support many pieces of information need to be assessed and therefore delivered tailor made to the decision – and the people making the decision, eg measuring the success of a ‘more development by agriculture’ for an African region by collecting data from all picking up points and small smallholder farms – and maybe also measuring the success of your campaign in the context of the next election. Apart from that analytics play a tremendous role in research and development – certainly of high interest in agriculture. |
Mobile Solutions | What is mobile business about? About the on time provision of information – whenever and wherever information is needed. As an example think of citizen who would like to establish a business in the rural areas. Where does he need support most: onsite in the rural area guided by mobile technology or – maybe - far away in the capital? Think of farmers at picking up points for produce: would it not be better to provide them with the latest market prices of his produce to negotiate the best price for his harvest? Wouldn’t it be good to give info on plants and fertilizers and their quality to farmers right where they are? This is what mobile is about. |
‘In Memory’ technologies | In Memory is a very technical term – so let us avoid it. What is behind it is giving you more insight in all your data real time – even if the amount of data is unbelievably huge – and: there is no sector so coined by big data than agriculture. So what if you could calculate the market price and provide the result to farmers in real time - mobile. What if your research organization could drill into any available farming data to find out what seeds lead to higher yields – or not? |
Cloud Services | Yes, cloud services seem to be far away from everyday’s business at a farm or a farmer association. But don’t let us be misled by the sound of the word. In rural farmer communities sharing is wide spread – so why not thinking about sharing information technology as well? |
And this is what we can do: we can provide smart combinations of applications and technologies to support a country’s agricultural sector – in order to develop your country and the life of your people,...
I will continue informing you about use cases, references, ideas in this are in following blogs on ‘Agri’… And if you want to learn more about and cannot wait for the next blog: just drop me a line…..
