As the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) continues reshaping economies across the globe, promising enhanced efficiency, transparency and service delivery, the question of readiness looms large for private and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in developing countries like Namibia.
Private companies are continuously embracing 4IR technologies and systems to maintain or improve their competitive advantage. However, SOEs seem to be lagging behind in this pursuit.
Even though most SOEs talk and take actions towards digital transformation, we are faced with numerous lost investments in digital transformation, with many companies spending a fortune on digital transformation initiatives, yet reaping little to no benefits, with some of these initiatives making efficiency losses worse-off.
This is quite prominent within SOEs in Namibia. We constantly hear of digital solutions introduced, yet client challenges remain unaddressed and services offered deteriorate even further.
We see instances where digital solutions are procured without clarity on workflow and process sequences within the organisation.
In some instances, these digital solutions have made processes and procedures longer and more cumbersome for clients.
Why is it so? This is usually because the pre-requisites for digital transformation are ignored or not dealt with intentionally before investments are made.
As much as digital transformation promises efficiency, transparency and much more, it is not the entire solution, but part of the solution.
What makes digital solutions yield the desired value is the work put in to prepare the organisation for digitalisation.
What does proper preparation for digital transformation entail?
- Standardisation and reengineering of business processes
- Policy reviews to eliminate misalignment between processes and policies
- Capacity building to capacitate organisational teams on standardised process execution, process performance monitoring and continuous improvement
- Leadership commitment to building a process-oriented and continuous improvement culture
- Creating a process-oriented culture to allow the use of continuous business process management as a complementary organisational management approach.
Digital solutions will only yield the desired results when the processes fed into these systems are workable.
Without the right precedence of activities in digitalisation efforts, these initiatives are bound to fail. A digital solution will not and cannot fix a broken system or process.
Processes and systems should be fixed, and digital solutions used to make them faster and more efficient.
*Vera Njong is an industrial engineer and business operations and strategy consultant with Akah Consultancy.
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