TRENDING
“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
most of the top global performers are scaling
their digital initiatives, optimising them or
seeking new opportunities.
CIOs in Africa have some inroads to make
to compete with their global peers. 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% 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
business strategy and planning,” said
Nielsen. “They clearly want digital fuelled
growth in 2019. Digital is not nice to have,
it’s mandatory. The investment in digital
is increasing and digital continues to gain
currency across the economy in Africa.”
The financial outlook for IT in Africa is
also promising. CIOs in Africa expect their
enterprise IT budget to increase by 4.3%
percent in 2019.
This is up from an average of 3.1% last
year. While the choice of technologies has
not changed year over year, the spending
amount for each has greatly increased. CIOs
in Africa expect to spend the highest amount
of new or additional funding in 2019 on
business intelligence and analytics (57%),
cybersecurity (46%) and digital business
initiatives (39%).
The survey also showed that cybersecurity is
becoming a Board of Directors issue.
“Cybersecurity is one of our hygiene factors,”
added Nielsen.
IT budgets are rising in 2019
Digital was ranked among the number one
business priority by CIOs in Africa (30%), with
business growth (23%) being at number two.
“This ranking shows that CIOs in Africa
are making digital an integral part of their
22
INTELLIGENTCIO
“It has to work. CIOs get no thanks when it
does, and when it fails spectacularly enough,
they can lose their jobs.”
Cybersecurity has already been deployed by
49% of CIO respondents in Africa and 33%
of them will deploy it in the next 12 months.
While cybersecurity is the top digital
technology deployment among CIOs in
Africa, disruptive technologies are reaching a
tipping point.
Conversational platforms were ranked in the
number two position, with 15% of CIOs in
Africa having already deployed it and 13%
deploying it in the next year.
“For a quarter of CIOs in Africa they will use
their AI-based applications for fraud analysis
on transactional data,” said Nielsen.
“In 2019 the journey into digitalisation
will accelerate and it is critical that
CIOs master new abilities to anticipate
and prepare the needed changes that
result from the scaling of their digital
business initiatives.” n
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IN 2019 THE
JOURNEY INTO
DIGITALISATION
WILL
ACCELERATE.
www.intelligentcio.com