Since the difficulties associated with digital and non-digital documentation were resolved with the debunking of claims surrounding the year 2000 millennium bug, the influx of major software brands like Google, Cisco and Microsoft creating platforms for the provision of rapid cyber solutions for their customer base has been on the increase.
This has further improved the lot of start-up ventures across the continent who leverage on the products these establishments have designed as they strive for optimal individual service delivery through their various business processes.
However, in spite of the boom in the number of IT-dependents in sub-Saharan Africa, there are relatively few entrepreneurs who are willing to dabble in the fields of data processing due to high amount of revenue required to successfully propel the companies to a state of profitability.
This is where the key function Kamal plays at Deloitte, the largest professional service network, comes to play.
Having initially spent 11 years at Deloitte Consulting as the partner in charge of the Telecommunications sector before joining Simeka Management Consulting as Managing Director till 2005, he has become the continent’s go-to resource for ICT foresight.
At present, Ramsingh serves as the Director for Technology Service at Deloitte South Africa leading the team that provides strategic advisory as well as application implementation and management services to local, pan-African and international organizations.
As a leader, Kamal prides himself on being able to combine strategic, human capital and financial advisory skills with deep technology expertise to provide clients with attractive business outcomes enabled by successful technology deployments.
In a bid to encourage data exploration in this part of the world, he and his organization have for the last five years published a compendium tagged ‘Tech Trends’. This generates their point of view on the top ten computing inclinations they think will impact businesses over the next eighteen to twenty-four months.
Highlighting the values tools like digi-mobilization can add to the development of the Gross Domestic Product of an emerging economy such as Nigeria’s, Kamal expressed, “There is an entire industry here and given the skills gap that Africa in itself has right now, the masses of technical proficiency can be mobilized. Given the sheer number of people in the Nigerian market, this is a goldmine in itself and that is something that we are looking at right [exploring] now.”
While reviewing the slow cyber-innovation trend witnessed in this part of the world, he stated that are there specific roles the government can play in helping the nation catch up with their foreign counter-parts in terms of pioneering IT research.
He said, “I think government should put key investments in technology in order to try and enable some of these crowd-sourcing channels help the Small and Medium Scale Enterprise sectors participate more actively in the technology market to build talents which will be phenomenal for them to support as well as to attract investments in technology which I think is a huge gap in the African market generally.
As for challenges that hinder venture capitalist advancements for the benefit of increasing the returns on investment as predicted by experts in the maximization of modern technologies for commerce, Ramsingh insists that with government funding entrepreneurial ideas and acting as a source of support for their execution, most of the issues can be avoided.
Nevertheless, the IT-professional drawing from his over twenty years of experience in data computing on a cautionary note states that for public and private enterprises to reap profitably from the opportunities that abound, an appraisal of the regulations surrounding the ease of importing, building and exporting skills that are available in other areas is necessary.
He further said that as a nation, “we [would have] to look at whether legislation prohibits new entrants into cloud marketing, crowd sourcing and digital engagements for some of these newer technologies as well as understand the spending patterns of government because they will be a very high spender in these areas. And maybe there needs to be a more viable environment for new companies and businesses to be able to support government’s transformation policies in the years to come.”
Having owned mobile products and services delivery companies, Karmal understands the importance creating high impact ICT solutions for the growing digitally dependent population across Africa.
Prior to working at Deloitte, he founded CIOAnywhere offering high-level IT consulting services using a team of highly experienced specialists and the internet as the medium for interaction as well as MobiSA (Pty) Ltd and Next Level Technologies which were headquartered in South Africa.
Speaking on some of the changes indigenous public and private sector investors should make in order to harness the opportunities that abound as a result of the huge market the sheer size of the country’s population presents, he stated, “I think there is an enormous opportunity in using the very high levels of internet connectivity to introduce a lot the technologies that are being innovated, whether it is for corporate needs or merely for social upliftment, education and mobile health.
“Over here,” he continued, “we have got over 130 million mobile subscribers and over 65 active internet accounts and that is a big opportunity.”
While many bemoan the impeded responsibilities of Chief Information Officers in organizations where a bias for income generation far supersedes the quest for research and development, the inability for management to bridge the gap between laboratory expeditions and life situations has been cited as one of the reasons for the low creativity rate and underfunding experienced in the sub-regional Info-Tech sector.
However, for the benefit of market dominance and enterprise continuity, an effective portfolio overhaul enabling the strategic performance of assets, projects and vendors as directed by the CIO’s need to be carried out.
As a solution, Ramsingh posited, “I do think that the roles of the CIO in Nigeria has to be radically relooked. They have to move into a venture-capitalist perspective to actively help businesses transform and not merely deploy technology.”
In other words information gate keepers and generators need begin to sell their ideas to management in such a way that puts the emphasis on reducing cost or increasing the bottom-line for the organizations they belong to, especially if they intend to stay relevant within the companies.
RITA OHAI
