In This Issue

As any business grows, data sharing increases in both volume and frequency. Every one of these digital relationships presents an expanding set of cyber risks. Cyber security has become a major priority for every organisation. The right controls and procedures must be put in place to detect potential attacks and protect against them. However, with the ever increasing risk of a cyber-attack businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the rapidly evolving cyber threats?

What are the practicalities in implementation when trying to apply and decode the draft Bill? I have spent considerable time recently evaluating the practicalities of implementing the Bill on the NMW at numerous clients’ requests. I find it lacking clarity as there are no practical methods for calculating wages and it doesn’t adhere to ‘plain language principle’.

Cloud Technology is a critical enabler of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Particularly when data intensive processes are involved, ‘platform as a service’ allows for innovative new ways for traditional problems to be solved, bringing agility, speed and scalability.

Have you ever sat in a meeting where the person who threw around the most jargon, who managed to build in the most buzzwords into every conversation, was perceived as the hottest property, the flavour of the month! To help you navigate through this minefield of buzzwords, to keep you at the top of your game, we offer some insights into some new and some not so new uses of jargon which continue to populate our many conversations at the office, extending after hours into our social lives.

Technological advancement is a main driver of economic growth, productivity, and operational efficiencies. Today, these technological advancements are largely in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (a subset of AI) – the ability of machines, through the use of algorithms, to interpret data, predict outcomes and learn from successes and failures. This technological development, known as the 4th Industrial Revolution, is going to bring enormous change to how we live and work.

Is South Africa headed down a road of jobless growth where a capital-intensive economy is incompatible with a labour-intensive need? According to an International Labour Organisation (ILO) report reviewed in Forbes Magazine, 11 August 2017, there are about 71 million unemployed 15 to 24-year-olds around the globe, many of them facing long-term unemployment. This is close to a historic peak of 13%.

Read our exclusive cover story entitled THE FUTURE OF JOBS? | ...OR UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE BASIC GLOBAL WAGE by Dr Ivor Blumenthal, CEO, ArkKonsult, as well a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the June/July 2018 edition of BusinessBrief.

As any business owner will tell you, one of the biggest challenges they face is access to markets. In South Africa, this is especially true for small and emerging businesses. While reform and support programmes will improve the situation, businesses also have a role to play when it comes to ensuring it’s as easy as possible for the market to find them.

One of the legal terms and concepts that appear to confuse employers and employees is ‘victimisation’. This is partially because the labour statutes do not deal directly with the concept of ‘workplace victimisation’. This is most surprising in view of the fact that victimisation does interfere with the right to fair labour practice.

Hailed by the African Union (AU) as the ‘new frontier of African renaissance’, the idea of the blue economy is gaining prominence across the continent. In 2014, the Seychelles, an early advocate of the blue economy, championed the agenda as ‘a vital part of Africa’s future development’. Meanwhile, states, including Kenya and South Africa, have begun formalising policy and legal frameworks to ‘unlock the ocean economy’, as a 2014 government report put it.