June 18, 2007

Africa to become world leaders in IT

Published: 07-JUN-07


What are the IT services challenges in the African continent?

Infrastructure is not what we are used in South Africa or the rest of the world, both in terms of availability and reliability. The business or in-dustry infrastructure is also lack-ing, for example bank clearing agencies and electronic mediums for communication. However, these are the challenges that create the opportunity for Africa to skip one step in the evolution of IT and business architecture and actually embrace new technology earlier. In mobile telecommunication, South Africa has kept up to date with the latest technologies and has made it affordable to most of the population.

In countries that have poor infrastructure like electricity, how have you developed solutions to get around this?

We are servicing the administration hubs of financial services and more specifically life assurance, which are less prone to these types of infrastructure limitations. What we find is that back office administration is usually central and other areas are serviced via the Internet with the option of using mobile devices as a back-up. We are just entering the mobile era and are of the opinion that Africa could become a world leader in this field.

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