Digital Transformation in Africa: Key Insights from Omdia’s Research - Africa Tech Festival 2023
Thecla Mbongue, Research Manager (MEA) at Omdia, shares her insights into the pivotal role of digital transformation in organisations from around Africa and the world. This session forms part of our 2023 event highlights series.
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The Future of Digital Transformation in Africa and Beyond: Keynote
Note: The below article has been created using a transcript of the video.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Africa Tech Festival headline keynote stream. In today's sessions, we will continue exploring the challenges and opportunities faced by African organizations and global organizations when implementing digital transformation.
The Importance of Digital Transformation in Africa
Digital transformation is now at the heart of most organizations in Africa, and in the telecoms industry, the pressure is doubled. Service providers must adapt their offerings to meet their customers' increasing demand for digital services, but they must also reorganize their own organizations to remain efficient.
Multi-Dimensional Transformation
This is a multi-dimensional transformation change that affects all aspects of the telecom service provider business, including customer interaction, operational processes, networks, technologies, architecture, organizational structure, and people.
Digital Transformation: A Continuous Journey
Digital transformation is an ongoing journey; it's not an end state. To provide insight into what service providers' views or sentiments are about digital transformation, I’ll now share some data from Omdia's Service Provider Digital Transformation and Cloud Strategy Survey.
Omdia Survey Insights: Drivers of Digital Transformation
This survey, conducted in 2023, highlights several key points.
First, when asked about the main drivers for digital transformation, respondents indicated that increasing business agility and end-to-end business transparency were top priorities. Service providers need to develop and deliver products and services more quickly to generate new revenues, and transparency is essential for efficiently managing operations and processes.
Customer Experience and Agility
Transforming customer experience and enhancing relationships, along with reducing time to market, are also considered important drivers. Customer experience often ranks highly in survey responses, and a shorter time to market reflects the need for greater agility and faster growth.
Challenges in Implementing Digital Transformation
When asked about the biggest challenges to successfully implementing a digital transformation project, many respondents pointed to non-technical issues.
Limited in-house IT expertise is considered the biggest challenge, which is not surprising given the multiple skill gaps across a wide range of domains. More surprisingly, a lack of clear digital strategy was identified as a major challenge, scoring higher than in last year's survey. This suggests that many service providers either lack a clear strategy or are not communicating it well.
Additional Challenges
Other significant challenges include a lack of internal stakeholder support, regulatory restrictions, and limited financial resources. Interestingly, employee resistance and cultural change issues appear to be less of a concern compared to previous years, likely because most people now recognize the direction telcos must move in to grow and survive.
Top Digital Transformation Initiatives
Regarding top digital transformation initiatives, service providers are focusing on improving customer experience, creating data-driven organizations, and accelerating cloud transformation.
Customer experience remains a key priority as telcos need to differentiate themselves in competitive markets. However, customer experience is also driven by the need to improve digital engagement channels to match those of digital-native companies.
Customer Requirements and Market Dynamics
Customer requirements are increasing in a fast-moving and complex environment where new customer and enterprise services, such as video gaming, IoT, private networks, and vertical industry use cases, are being launched.
Investment Priorities for Digital Transformation
The survey also highlighted investment areas needed to prioritize digital transformation. Network automation and open APIs are perceived as the most important investment areas. As network and service complexity increases, more open, componentized, and reusable approaches become critical.
Transition to the African Context
That concludes the overview of the survey. We will now move on to topics focused more narrowly on the African continent. Our first session will delve into the field of cybersecurity with a presentation titled "Cybersecurity and the Threat to Africa's Digital Growth."