IT Services

How CIOs in Africa can catch up with their global peers on digital business

Staff Writer

 ·18 Sep 2018

Digital business is maturing and forcing organisations to change their business models and look to IT to help, says research and advisory group, Gartner.

Half of the CIOs in Africa said their organisation has changed or is in the process of changing their business models, and the CIO will have a pivotal role to play, according Gartner’s annual CIO survey.

The survey found that 63% of CIO respondents in Africa are taking a lead role or are heavily involved in the decision to change business models.

It also revealed that IT has a paramount role to play in the change. “For 90% of CIOs in Africa IT is very or extremely important to business model change,” said Tomas Nielsen, research director at Gartner.

Gartner analysts presented these findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place in Cape Town.

The 2019 Gartner CIO Agenda Survey gathered data from more than 3,000 CIO respondents in 89 countries and all major industries, representing approximately $15 trillion in revenue/public-sector budgets and $284 billion in IT spending.

Sixty-two CIOs from Africa were surveyed, representing $4.4 billion in IT spending.

The shift in business and operating models means that CIOs must secure a new foundation for IT. Globally 33% of organisations are scaling and harvesting the results of digital business, while in Africa only 21% of CIOs are at that stage.

“African CIOs are still catching up on their digital business efforts compared with their CIO peers globally,” said Nielsen.

“More than half of CIOs in Africa are showing an interest or at the designing stage, while the majority of the top global performers are scaling their digital initiatives, optimising them or seeking new opportunities.”

CIOs in Africa have some inroads to make in order to compete with their global peers, Gartner said.

To help them move their digital initiatives from tentative experiment to massive scale they need to adopt a new secure foundation for their IT efforts.

Nielsen recommends CIOs in Africa focus on three elements:

• Secure customer centricity: Don’t rush into the goal of “digital first”, instead, focus on creating continuous experience across the customer life cycle. Then ensure that cybersecurity programmes become digital business enablers, rather than obstacles to innovation. Finally measure what matters. For 36 per cent of CIOs in Africa, the impact on consumer engagement was their top KPI to measure digital investments.
• Resourced product management: This is where CIOs shift from a project to a product approach to digital business. A product-centric approach reduces friction in the delivery of driving quicker business outcomes as well as improving customer satisfaction and employee engagement, and enables high flexibility. That flexibility is crucial to the implementation of digital business value propositions.
• Business enabling technologies: The choices a CIO makes about technology are essential to the success of digital business. In this situation, CIOs supports the change in business and operating models by adopting game changer technologies, Artificial intelligence (AI) being one of them.

Read: Outlook for IT in Africa is promising despite economic challenges: Gartner