Digital Transformation - Afrikan Heroes

Togo Partners ECA to Establish the African Cybersecurity Center

August 17, 2022

Hon. Cina Lawson Togo Minister of Digital Economy and Digital Transformation

The Republic of Togo and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) are pleased to announce their signature of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to collaborate on establishing the “African Center for Coordination and Research in Cybersecurity”.

As a central regional hub for cybersecurity information and intelligence based in Lomé (Togo), the center will act independently and objectively in expertise and activities related to promoting cybersecurity and the investigation of cybercrime.

Its missions will cover, but are not be limited to:

Building capacities and supporting established cybersecurity agencies in African countries

Collaborating with African governments, policymakers, law enforcement and security experts towards creating effective frameworks for assessing and mitigating cyber threats and promoting cybersecurity in the region

Providing highly specialized technical and research capabilities for cybersecurity promotion in the region

Hon. Cina Lawson Togo Minister of Digital Economy and Digital Transformation

On March 23 and 24, 2022, the 1st Cybersecurity Summit co-organized by the Republic of Togo and the ECA brought together Heads of State and Government, private sector leaders, and civil society leaders for a dialogue to address the pressing cybersecurity challenges of Africa.

During the summit, Member States adopted the “Lomé Declaration on cybersecurity and the fight against cybercrime” (Lomé Declaration).

The Lomé Declaration is a commitment by member states to sign and ratify the African Union “Malabo Convention” – one of the most elaborate conventions in the world on cybersecurity, and strengthen African cooperation in cybersecurity and the fight against cybercrime.

As a result, the MOU between the Republic of Togo and ECA will enable the creation of the African Cybersecurity Center to support African countries in executing the Lomé Declaration.

To date, Togo is one of the few countries to have ratified the Malabo Convention. The country has implemented a legal and regulatory framework adapted to cybersecurity and established regulatory entities such as the National Cybersecurity Agency (ANCy) and the Personal Data Protection Authority (IPDCP).

Moreover, In partnership with Asseco Data Systems, a Polish cybersecurity company, the Togolese Republic has set up a cybersecurity service company – Cyber Defense Africa (CDA), composed mainly of Togolese, for the protection of its cyberspace while ensuring a transfer of skills.

Hon. Cina Lawson, Minister of Digital Economy, said, “We are pleased to partner with ECA to further our commitment to making cybersecurity a top priority for our nations.

We aim to become a significant digital hub in Africa. Our partnership model with the private sector is an innovative approach that we want to showcase to inspire other countries for safer cyberspace on the continent.”

The Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of ECA, Dr Vera Songwe, said, “It is important to promote coordinated cybersecurity approaches in Africa.

UNECA is further strengthened in its determination to promote cybersecurity in the region to advance the African digital economy, and we are pleased to partner with the Government of Togo to ensure that a key commitment derived from the Lomé Declaration on Cybersecurity and Fight Against Cybercrime, 2022 is now to be commenced”.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Important Factors to Consider While Building a Business Intelligence Programme for Your Organisation

January 20, 2022

Hyther Nizam is the President - MEA, Zoho Corp

By Hyther Nizam

With digital transformation picking up faster than ever before in the business landscape, most organisations today employ a mix of business tools to run their operations across sales, marketing, finance, HR, etc. More often than not, all of these tools include a reporting module that displays department-specific data records and statements. However, stand-alone data like sales figures, lead numbers, email open rates, and the like, can only tell you so much about customer behaviour.

As businesses continue to go digital and become increasingly data-driven, it’s imperative for them to include a holistic business intelligence (BI) programme in their technology strategy. A comprehensive BI programme helps combine various data points from multiple sources, perform cross-functional analysis, and bring out intuitive insights like inspirations behind seasonal customer trends, reasons for supply-chain gaps, sales funnel pain points gathered from customer feedback, productivity drops due to employee attrition, future trend predictions, and whatnot. Powerful information like this can enable organisations to adopt a culture of smart, evidence-based decision-making and gain a true competitive edge.

Getting started with a business analytics and intelligence program

Provided that your organisation has the necessary funding and resources to implement a central BI programme, the first natural step is to identify the key business metrics you want to compute and track.

As pointed out here, once you have identified the goals, the next step is defining a data strategy. You need to go about defining your data strategy for key focus areas and then identify and align its data sources with that strategy. From there, it should be relatively simple for the organisation to build a data pipeline and prepare the data for analysis.

Building a robust, unified data pipeline from disparate sources

Prepping the data pipeline is one of the biggest challenges organisations face while implementing their BI programme. Using a mixed toolset offered by different vendors translates to disparate data sets that need to first be integrated, blended, and unified to enable a(n) smoother as well as accurate analysis procedure. In fact, it’s been noted that 80% of analysis time is spent on data preparation as poor quality data often results in untrustworthy business insights.

This is where BI tools that include data preparation provisions come in handy. Be it a custom-built BI program or a bespoke tool, it’s important that your option incorporates data-prepping and blending capabilities, i.e., ability to connect to different sources (legacy or cloud app) and port data in different formats, clean and remove duplicates, blend the data into a single data warehouse, and improve the overall data quality. This helps ensure robust, error-free data pipelines, in turn assuring reliable business intel.

Updating your privacy practices and official policy

With a BI programme, your obligation as a company to protect customer data becomes greater. Some privacy practices to keep in mind include, (1) masking critical user data, i.e., removing personally identifiable information from all data sets using anonymization methods, before feeding them into the BI data pipeline, (2) collecting explicit consent from the data subjects (customers and employees) to use their anonymized data for BI analysis, (3) ensuring that your data sources are also subject to stringent privacy standards, and finally, (4) updating your organisation’s customer privacy policy straight away to include required details about your BI programme.

Integrating your BI program with internal collaboration platforms

Despite setting up a cost-intensive, comprehensive BI programme, many organisations struggle to drive adoption among their teams and prompt necessary action or decision-making. One way to solve this is to integrate the BI system widely and deeply across internal communication and collaboration platforms used by employees such as email, chat, intranet forums, project management avenues, etc. The BI dashboards must allow executives to blend and visually analyse data for cross-functional insights, fashion the insights into easily understandable and interactive reports, decide the next course of action, and subsequently share the information with the teams or individuals concerned in real time.

Staying future-ready – leave room for innovation

As you implement modern technologies and boost your operational efficiencies, running a future-ready business also includes being constantly on the lookout for innovation, and ensuring that the business systems and processes are elastic enough to absorb the change. Similarly, your BI programme should have enough legroom to experiment and capitalise on emerging opportunities like AI-powered voice analytics and RPA/business analytics integration. For instance, current AI trends have made it possible for users to hold conversations with AI assistants to generate automated BI insights with a single click, predict future trends, conduct as well as visualise cognitive and what-if analyses, and much more.

If the events of the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that things can change incredibly quickly and it’s vital to be flexible. Cloud-based BI tools enable business owners to look at real-time data from across departments. to make quick decisions. This helps businesses stay nimble during unprecedented times.

Hyther Nizam is the President – MEA, Zoho Corp

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Cybersecurity Should Be a Top Priority for Africa’s Digital Transformation

August 12, 2021

By Ian Engelbrecht

Cloud adoption in South Africa and many other African countries is accelerating, helped along by the COVID-19 workplace disruption, and the need to reduce costs, manage risk and scale, and become more competitive.

There are many drivers behind digital transformation strategies and many decisions that need to be made, such as which public cloud to consume. However, this should be less urgent than addressing security concerns.

As we continue to work with organisations in different industries spread across our diverse continent, cybersecurity and cyber risk are increasingly important considerations for the C-suite.

Against the backdrop of high-profile security breaches and ransomware, addressing security weaknesses are a key part of the success of digital transformation initiatives. An organisation needs to digitally transform to secure itself from threats.

Security Should Be a Top Consideration

In this context, security is ahead of function and location in the pecking order of considerations. Organisations have a pressing need to secure themselves as the long-term consequences of failing to do so are devastating.

Here, managing and upgrading infrastructure is vitally important, as is building a careful strategy to manage legacy applications and the risks inherent in them. A robust Modern Data Protection strategy, ensuring seamless backup and recovery, is a vital cog in this wheel.

Beyond the added pressures to address security, which is a global challenge, the uptake of the cloud in Africa does have additional challenges, with some countries being more affected.

Hybrid Work vs. Remote Work

Let’s start with the actual physical organisation. From a South African perspective, we are seeing a trend where many companies are requesting that their workforce return to offices – if only for a certain percentage of the time.

The sense is that while much can be accomplished virtually, there are certain functions such as skills transfer that have been hamstrung by the work-from-home culture. For instance, if an IT worker shadows someone in person, there are some skills and nuances that cannot be transferred virtually.

The future workplace will therefore be a hybrid model, where the functions that can be done remotely are done from anywhere, but areas that need in-person collaboration, skills transfer, and a reading of body language in important meetings will happen on-premises.

It is important not to read this as a threat to digital transformation broadly and migration to the cloud specifically. It won’t change the need for enterprises to migrate to the cloud, but it does signal an appetite to consider hybrid solutions – that nothing is one-size-fits-all.

Three Biggest Challenges to Africa’s Digital Transformation

The three biggest challenges in Africa are bandwidth, connectivity, and infrastructure. While South Africa has made impressive headway in these three areas, they remain a bigger challenge elsewhere.

By way of analogy, imagine a bank that needs to handle hundreds of transactions every second or millisecond, which is fed into a database. To transfer this into a public cloud that is hosted in another country, or a data centre that is physically some distance away needs fast, reliable, and stable connectivity. If a transaction takes a millisecond longer than it would if it was on-prem, then the customer experience becomes affected.

African businesses are aware of this, and in the Veeam Data Protection Report 2021, 35% of African organisations cited industry disruption as the biggest challenge they anticipated. This was followed by economic uncertainty (32%) and changing customer needs (32%).

These three challenges that are holding back some cloud adoptions are not typically the challenges one would see in developed markets. However, it is important to acknowledge that while there are many that can, not all organisations will be able to move 100% to the cloud – and not all will need to.

The Hybrid Cloud Model

Largely, there is still going to be a level of physical infrastructure required to manage local offices.

Some industries can certainly be run with 100% cloud strategies, but others can’t. Some applications don’t make sense going to the cloud yet.

By way of analogy, let’s imagine a bank once more. There may be dozens of databases inside their application stack. Some of those databases may not have support yet in the public cloud, so some would move to the public cloud, while some would remain on-prem – so the bank would need to invest in the public cloud, while still renewing hardware on-prem.

When the cloud is 100% ready, the shift will happen, but the likely scenario is a hybrid cloud strategy for the foreseeable future.

Much of the roadmap that we will follow on this continent is being carved out by developed markets, and it gives us a clear sense of where and how cloud strategies in Africa will evolve.

Once ensuring there is a clear strategy for securing data, African enterprises will continue to leverage and unleash the power of the cloud, but this won’t happen with a one-size-fits-all approach.

Ian Engelbrecht is the Africa lead, systems engineer at Veeam.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Three Biggest Money Wasters When Investing in Digital Transformation

July 12, 2021

By Seraj Dicks

Digital transformation is a business imperative, yet many industries have struggled to put this into practical effect. Thanks to COVID-19, lockdown and forced work from home (WFH) restrictions, remote employees and clients’ expectations needed to be met in an unrestrained, highly competitive environment.

Successful industries who invested in Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) in 2020 will most certainly have seen a return on their investment – but how have they done this?

“With COVID-19, everyone is seeing digital acceleration, but few organisations are tracking what their business outcomes are from these,” says James Anderson, research VP at Gartner.

“Where are companies wasting money? They’re not using business metrics to influence investment. They’re doing what people tell them to do.”

Digital business transformation is only valuable if it solves pre-identified business problems, and 3 of the more prominent wasteful expenditures in relation to technology investment are below:

Poor Cloud Adoption Strategy

Organisations that do not have the necessary centralised cloud adoption strategy run the risk of ‘cloud sprawl’, which increases costs and leads to compliance and security issues. It also, quite simply, makes for an unnecessarily complex, cumbersome system.

In recent years, businesses have seen tangible benefits from the adoption of cloud technology, know-how and virtualisation, including that it has resulted in much less hardware being required to host vital business functions and databases – critical factors in today’s businesses.

In the past, a server was necessary to run every workload, but this is no longer the case. Using on-premise technology not only costs money, but the investment required is also significantly more expensive no matter how you look at it: downtime risk, back-up power, cooling, licensing and support costs all increase year-on-year. Cloud computing solves almost all of these issues.

Ignoring Interoperability can be an Expensive Mistake

If new technology is deemed necessary, businesses must consider whether it will integrate with existing software and platforms that they do not plan on replacing.

When new technology cannot seamlessly integrate into legacy environments, the investment becomes either worthless or much more expensive, as more money will need to be spent to integrate. Having an experienced system integrator can reduce the risk and ensure a smooth business transition.

Misunderstanding the Customer

The customer journey has changed, and technology has rapidly changed along with it. Building custom applications without understanding consumers’ needs can result in ballooning costs with no real business benefits.

Now more than ever, it is important to remain agile and meet the ever-changing demands of the consumer, finding the right balance between “being on the leading edge and reeling in the bleeding edge. These three points have proven extremely effective in controlling technology investment costs.

As long-term technology partners, we understand where the most common holes in your business are – and, critically, how to fix them.

Over the last few years, organisations have had to consider additional complexities that large-scale system integration projects can bring, which were not around before. Based on my experience in the sector, some of the tried and trusted ways to address these complexities include:

Consistent communication: Maintaining uninterrupted lines of communication and ensuring transparent streams of information between every transferring section.

Coordination: Having coordinated handshakes and hand-offs between the transferring parts.

Alignment: Making sure that self-organised (autonomous) and self-sufficient (cross-functional) groups are all committed to moving the business in the direction of one unified goal.

Learning: Replicating success and mitigating failure from experience.

Risk management: Identifying danger early and proactively mitigating threats, while taking advantage of opportunities at business enterprise scale.

Among the major benefits of agile environments is their ability to respond quickly to market changes.

“It has been proven that agile IT infrastructure increases your ‘time to value’ as a business, i.e. the time between issuing a request and when it is delivered,” says XX. “There is no question that minimising the time to value is important to organisations, but the best way to do this is through modern IT systems.”

The inability to augment new technology with old seems to be the most common point of contention.

“This is always a complex problem to solve and requires highly skilled resources who understand both environments. The priority for any business, when implementing new technology is to solve business problems or inefficiencies. While some solutions are obvious, others require in-depth investigation.”

“Investing in scalability will assist in ensuring systems can fit in conjunction with a business’s existing processes. The more mature an enterprise’s system is, the more able it is to deal with any circumstance. I strongly suggest frequently reviewing operational and technology requirements to optimize your business for success long into the future,” he concludes.

Seraj Dicks is Head of Delivery: DevOps Professional Services at Altron Systems Integration.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

‘Africa to become global economy’s linchpin’ Says Ethiopian PM

March 24, 2021

Africa’s future depends mostly on its ability to embark on digital transformation, and run a climate-smart economy. This was the submission of the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed who said that if the continent wants to compete for the future, it has to start working assiduously towards achieving digital transformation, a climate-smart economy, and an enabling institutional structure.

Abiy Ahmed made the remarks in his opening address to a conference of African ministers of finance, planning and development as part of the 53rd session of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

“There is no doubt that Africa will overtime be a vital linchpin to the global economy,” said the 2019 Nobel laureate. “However, it must do these three things well and quickly to improve its chances of success.”

“We must scale up our investments – a trend already turbocharged by the COVID-19 pandemic. The digital economy is both a source of growth and a key competitive enabler of other productive sectors,” he said.

The ECA annual event – skipped last year due to the pandemic – was launched last Tuesday under the theme “Africa’s sustainable industrialization and diversification in the digital era in the context of COVID-19.”

“The second goal that every African country must adopt is making our economies climate-smart and resilient in diverse ways,” he said, calling for a climate-smart manufacturing sector to drive increasing exports and foreign currency earnings and create employment opportunities.

Africa, he said, must also put in place resilient institutions capable of implementing reforms to help the continent withstand the challenges of the future. Digital transformation is a key driving force for innovation and sustainable growth that can transform Africa into a global powerhouse, said the prime minister.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Now is the time to set yourself up for the future of best practices By Dr. Ibrahim Abduba

June 4, 2020

Dr. Ibrahim Abduba, ERPM Strategy and Business Development Leader – East & West Africa at Oracle

It has been said over and over by a multitude of business systems experts. One of the greatest barriers to digital transformation is not technological. It is human resistance to change. Within an enterprise, a wholesale culture shift is needed for digitalisation to take hold and be used to its full efficiency-boosting potential.

Of course, enterprises are now operating in a context of forced, unprecedented change beyond the scenarios covered in most business continuity plans. Who projected that we would one day be in a situation where essentially everything would close at the same time, crippling supply chains? Or that a company’s workforce would be mandated to stay home, with no access to on-premise systems? Businesses need new solutions to ensure business continuity in the current economic climate, recover quickly and ensure operational resilience in the “next normal” beyond COVID-19.

The time is ripe for change, but it demands a greater embrace of new perspectives. These newer attitudes have been slowly taking root in Africa. First, there was the move from manual to automated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) (https://bit.ly/3cohBuI) applications. This led to the realisation over the past decade that cloud-based systems drive greater operational agility than their on-premise equivalent, allowing enterprises to operate efficiently and securely, even across borders. As an example, Bank of Kigali Plc (https://bit.ly/3ctrO99) in Rwanda has leveraged cloud-based functionality such as end-to-end process automation to reduce costs, improve scalability and innovate customer offerings.

Despite such success stories, many companies continue to cling to the mindset of “I have my own customised ERP, and it works for me; I’m not giving it up.” That attitude is understandable, but current challenges prove traditional ERPs lack the flexibility to overcome them efficiently. Rigidity is simply not contemporary best practice.

Even before the current crisis, Steve Cox, Oracle’s Group Vice President for ERP EPM Product Marketing, referred to the future of best practices as being one of less work, more automation and better outcomes (https://bit.ly/304lJNS). The wider business context has, of course, shifted, but evolving technology remains key to unlocking business benefits, such as greater speed and cost savings.

Best practice is also continually being disrupted and redefined by emerging technologies. We see artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) well entrenched in Oracle Cloud applications now, producing insights from big data, automatically maintaining systems and underpinning chatbots. Becoming similarly commonplace in enhancing everyday work processes are the likes of blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality (AR), with the first two having special advantages for supply chain management (SCM).

Even with expensive IT upgrade cycles, old on-premise platforms may battle to integrate with such new solutions. By contrast, through cloud, enterprises can instantly leverage the latest best-in-class technologies, which connect seamlessly because of already considered integration capabilities. The cost of continual upgrades goes away, and it becomes easier to predict spend and calculate budgets.

With continual cycles of disruption the new business “normal,” the ability to accurately predict and prepare has become the best practice for enterprises. Cloud ERP offers users the ability to effortlessly pull together data sets across a business for better insights that drive scenario planning and optimisation strategies. At the same time, an organisation’s human talent is liberated to focus on innovation instead of losing their workdays to mundane manual tasks like report generation and transaction processing.

Leveraging these capabilities, and more, does not require reinventing the wheel. To make an enterprise truly future-ready, and minimise unpredictable risk, starts with overcoming attitude barriers.

Dr. Ibrahim Abduba, ERPM Strategy and Business Development Leader – East & West Africa at Oracle

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry