Our immature ICT industry

Yesterday I was again confronted with the fact that the ICT industry is very immature. One of our partners announced the withdrawal of a relative new product!  What makes it more difficult to understand is that the product was sound and addressed the SME market which is a focus and an opportunity in Africa.

One can argue what is the problem with an immature industry?   It creates opportunities and is very dynamic with higher margins.   It is however the negatives that does impact all.  In this case some customers made the bold move to buy this product and their peers, colleagues and manager knew about the decision. They are now embarrassed by the fact that unexpectedly the product is withdrawn.

In the motor industry a roadmap for a product is known in advance and a buyer knows this vehicle will still be manufactured for 2 or 3 years etc.   

We have invested in education, training, demo equipment, marketing seminars, printed brochures and proposed the product at several customers in the past 12 months.  We are now embarrassed and on the financial side is was not a profitable exercise!

Recently a question was asked on a ICT e-mail forum as to why ICT in Africa is expensive.  The immaturity of the industry contributes to cost.  Tenders requests are issued but often not awarded.  Products just installed are being withdrawn by vendors.  

A former employee told me recently that the IT Manager at a Tanzanian mobile company  regularly took 15% of the contract value as bribe while he was employed at a supplier. Corruption and Bribes, destroys the rule of law in countries, trust between citizens and those in authority.

We often experience a situation where systems we support runs into interface issues with other systems. Often the answer from the other system's support team is "We could not find any problem".  If you however analyse the logs their system's behaviour changes as the investigation was done!  It raise the question as to the honesty and correctness of the finding. 

Gartner recently said "The survey revealed that service and software providers have improved their position from 2008, but remain relatively immature in terms of both their internal programs, as well as their market offerings."  Quote from "Gartner and WWF Assess Low-Carbon and Environmental Leadership in the ICT Industry 2010" http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1458613

We should all work toward improving. On the positive side there is more and more standards and processes like ITIL

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Good Corporate Governance

Today I had to refuse to support a customer (non paying international corporate)

A child will enter a room while his parents are present with a noticeable guilty face if he or she stepped out of line. The same should be the case with international corporate players, but yet it is not true. Many companies have processes and procedures to bully their suppliers and vendors and yet they have no guilt. I copied the following from Wikipedia:

Corporate governance is the set of processes, customs, policies, laws, and institutions affecting the way a corporation (or company) is directed, administered or controlled. Corporate governance also includes the relationships among the many stakeholders involved and the goals for which the corporation is governed. The principal stakeholders are the shareholders, the board of directors, executives, employees, customers, creditors, suppliers, and the community at large.

Corporate governance is a multi-faceted subject.[1] An important theme of corporate governance is to ensure the accountability of certain individuals in an organization through mechanisms that try to reduce or eliminate the principal-agent problem. A related but separate thread of discussions focuses on the impact of a corporate governance system in economic efficiency, with a strong emphasis on shareholders' welfare. There are yet other aspects to the corporate governance subject, such as the stakeholder view and the corporate governance models around the world (see section 9 below).

There has been renewed interest in the corporate governance practices of modern corporations since 2001, particularly due to the high-profile collapses of a number of large U.S. firms such as Enron Corporation and MCI Inc. (formerly WorldCom). In 2002, the U.S. federal government passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, intending to restore public confidence in corporate governance.

Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_governance