Mistakes Botswana should avoid as she transitions into 3rd Industrial Revolution
The Business Excellence
The current automation and digitalisation narrative as well as the value chain and smart green digital economy paradigms are the waves of the third industrial revolution.
Botswana, just like many other developing nations, has been struggling to evolve from second industrial revolution because of slow adaptation to the changing environment.
The third industrial revolution’s main distinctive elements are electronics, information management, green energy, improvement in management systems and mental models.
This industrial revolution accelerated the digital economy of many developed nations and this simply means these countries started taking advantage of technology to accelerate and streamline economic activities of organisations to improve the business bottom- line and meet the customer expectations.
This is the time when the world started to witness acceleration in the way businesses innovate their business processes and business models to scale and sustain their competitive advantage. To maximise the benefits that come with this revolution, organisations should invest in internet of things ( IoT) and digital infrastructure and the internet should be less costly to every Motswana and it should be a basic resource of every worker.
The current reality of an expensive internet in Botswana is a concern that should be addressed. Internet is no longer a luxury or a fringe benefit given to managers and CEOs only, it is required to perform many digital economic transactions and as a result the government should come up with progressive policies that will make it affordable and reliable to enhance the digital economy.
Failure to regulate the high cost of accessing the internet as well as creating a digital ecosystem will collapse the economy because many businesses will fail to digitalise, productivity will keep on declining, the current low innovation level will not improve, competitiveness level will keep on declining and customers’ dissatisfaction will increase. The government should fund innovation and research and development especially the ICT sector which has the potential to produce digital systems and help businesses to automate.
Financing these businesses will not only make technology cheap locally, it will improve employment and hire 20 thousand technology graduates who have disruptive skills of developing softwares, robotics, programming and developing systems.
It will also improve import rate of the country because these ICT companies will be able to sell their products to other African countries who are also transitioning into third industrial revolution. In this article, organisations are advised to adopt the best practices as they use technology particularly automation and digitalisation and the general mistakes that they should avoid.
Since automation is now a buzzword, there is complacency in some organisations because they tend to compromise quality by not following best practices as they automate. To effectively maximise the benefits of automation, organisations are encouraged to do things right the first time by ensuring that the systems that they develop are driven by technological experts such as software developers, programmers and designers to avoid system down conundrum.
All automations that are done by the organisation should be aligned to the internal or external customer needs and this is normally clarified in a project business case. Automation or digitalisation should not be construed as a panacea to the existing problems like poor service delivery, customer complaints, declining sales and quality problems.
These are unique problems that need thorough diagnosis and problem solving methodologies. It is a bad practice to automate processes that have multiple bottlenecks because it worsens operational efficiency of the organisation, therefore, it is advisable to reengineer all the processes to make them lean by shortening their turnaround time to improve service delivery and customer satisfaction.
This is called intelligent automation and it requires effective planning, alignment and programming these systems to function on their own by reducing human element just like it is the case with cell phone banking and BURS annual tax return system.
Moreover, a well- designed system should be able to generate intelligence and respond accordingly. Organisations are advised to rationalise existing systems and ensure their interoperability so that they all focus in one business direction.
Sometimes, there is no need to have 10 different systems in one organisation when it is possible to have only 3 or 2 multi- tasking systems. Moreover, organisations should adopt digital culture by adopting the following principles; collaboration, evidence based decision making, customer centricity, innovation, risk management and continual improvement.
The Author is a member of African Excellence Forum, Holds Master of Science Degree in Strategic Management and is a Certified Manager of Quality and Organisational Excellence from America Society for Quality. Six Sigma Greenbelt, ISO 9001: 2015 Certified.