FINAL WORD
Connecting all corners of Kenya to
intelligent public services
personalise citizens’ experiences and
interactions with the communities
4. Smart cities
These employ the use of IoT sensors,
Blockchain, Machine Learning, analytics,
mobile and in-memory data platforms.
These technologies help cities to
improve service delivery, including
transportation, economy, environment,
and resource management
The challenge for Kenya’s government
is connecting its various urban and rural
areas in a way that enables it to achieve
the ambitions set out in President Uhuru
Kenyatta’s Big Four agenda; namely food
security, affordable housing, manufacturing
and affordable healthcare.
According to the World Bank, agriculture and
associated industries contributed 31.5% of
Kenya’s GDP in 2017. However, a closer look
will reveal that most farmers in the country
are subsistence farmers, who rely on the
same techniques and processes that their
parents and grandparents did.
As an example, only 5% of cultivated land in
Africa makes use of irrigation, compared to
38% in Asia. This results in low productivity
and lower yield compared to countries
with more advanced or modern farming
techniques. Citizen-centric public-sector
interventions in this sector could bring
technology and modern farming techniques
to subsistence farmers to improve their
practices, open up market access, and
facilitate greater economic participation.
One example is SAP Rural Sourcing
Management, a cloud-based solution that
tracks and collects data related to farms,
farmers, cultivated plots, crops and farm gate
selling processes. Farmers access the solution
via their mobile phones to see critical
information and best practice guidelines to
improve their farming operations and then
connects them to a global marketplace for
their produce, increasing farmers' revenue
and expanding the realm of possibility
for subsistence farmers. A pilot phase
of the solution saw more than 100,000
farmers across nine African countries use
it, improving market linkages across the
value chain and increasing local production
capacity and yield quality.
Access to effective, affordable healthcare
can similarly be improved with innovative
technology use. Better tracking of accurate
data could provide insight into the real
healthcare needs of the population and
ensure government interventions are
successfully executed. For example, cancer
screening equipment meant for rural clinics
will have little positive benefits to the local
96
INTELLIGENTCIO
Robin Njiru, Director: General Business at
SAP East Africa
population if there are no available skills to
successfully utilise the equipment.
A citizen-centric technology-enabled public
sector would have access to data that
indicates whether the correct skills are locally
available or whether the government needs
to deploy additional resources to the area.
The rise of the Intelligent
Public Sector
How does Kenya’s government start getting
a clearer, more accurate picture of food
production, healthcare needs and other
citizen-centric services to improve delivery
and better support citizens, businesses and
government departments? Currently, public
sector organisations around the world are
investing in four strategic priorities to meet the
demands of greater citizen-centricity, namely:
1. Digital government management
This helps governments embrace
digital technologies, replace aging
infrastructure to transform and integrate
financial, procurement, workforce, and
asset management processes
2. Data-driven government
This equips governments with accurate
data for real-time decision-making. This
help government to improve business
intelligence by solving policy issues and
optimise the use of public funds
3. Citizen experience
This puts citizens at the centre of
policy decisions. The use of intelligent
technologies helps government to
By leveraging digital technologies, public
sector organisations can be transformed
into Intelligent Public Enterprises that
create flexible and agile business processes
that are designed to adapt in real time
and deliver positive outcomes. Public
sector employees can also be transformed
into digitally-enabled, dynamic and
outcomes-based organisational teams,
while public sector assets can be utilised
more effectively as sensors monitor the
health of assets. This data is processed
by predictive analytics to pre-empt
potential maintenance issues. In fact, the
IDC predicts that by 2019, 15% of tax
collection, welfare reimbursement and
immigration control will be supported by
some form of embedded analytics.
What truly activates the possibilities of the
Intelligent Public Enterprise is to extend
business processes and generate greater
value through innovation platforms such as
SAP Leonardo. Predictive maintenance and
services reduce costly outages due to asset
downtime by analysing sensor data in real
time, predicting and preventing failures and
improving availability. An asset intelligence
network hosted in the cloud can create
enormous opportunity for collaboration with
internal teams and external business partners,
allowing utilities to improve safety and
compliance, reduce outages and improve the
overall operating asset efficiency.
Transforming public sector organisations
into Intelligent Public Enterprises offers
immense opportunities for sustainable,
positive impact. The challenge for public
sector organisations is how to approach this
transformation with agility and scale while
minimising risk. Here, trusted global providers
with a track record of success can play a key
role in enabling future-fit Intelligent Public
Enterprises tuned to the needs of connected
citizens and associated stakeholders. n
www.intelligentcio.com