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 They are now embarrassed by the fact that unexpectedly the product is withdrawn.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  Products just installed are being withdrawn by vendors.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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