Siemens has presented the African Digitalisation Maturity Report, which lays out a digitalisation benchmark across four countries, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia, as well as key vertical industries – transport, manufacturing and energy.
CEO of Siemens Southern Africa, Sabine Dall’Omo says the four countries were selected as some of the fastest growing economies in Africa that have also made great strides in the adoption of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). “Africa’s rapid urbanisation represents a huge opportunity for the extension of ICT and the improvement of digital maturity to help urban hubs cope with the influx of inhabitants,” she says. “For us, digitalisation means using new technologies like data analytics, the cloud and the Internet of Things to merge the virtual and real worlds. This enables us to offer our customers substantial productivity increases across their entire value chain, from design and engineering to sales, production and service. In concrete terms, this means faster time-to-market, greater flexibility and enhanced availability of our products and systems for our customers. In Africa, the challenge lies in applying digitalisation in the context of various macro-economic factors such as regulation and infrastructure.”
The report measures the extent to which each country has a business, legal and regulatory environment that supports and protects the development of digitalisation in key industries. This includes indicators such as the overall ease of doing business, the presence and regulation of ICT-related laws, the protection of intellectual property and evidence of ICT-related innovation and startup activities.
Quality of infrastructure indicators include access to international bandwidth, mobile network coverage, Internet and mobile phone penetration and the costs of broadband and mobile phone access.
Skills are another vital component of maturity. Dall’Omo adds that Siemens believes that digitalisation can bridge the gap between blue and white collar workers to create the ‘grey collar’ worker. This implies humans and machines are not competing for jobs, but rather working together to create a new type of talent. The challenge is whether or not government and industry are investing enough into the development of these skills.
Country analysis
While the larger and more developed economies tend to be more digitally mature, the analysis shows there are many indicators that can influence a country’s ability to capitalise on digitalisation. If done correctly these can drive entrepreneurial competition in the market.
While the Ethiopian and Kenyan economies are of a similar size and are growing at similar rates, Kenya is ahead in terms of digital matur-ity. This is attributed to the country having a far more extensive ICT, mobile Internet and 3G infrastructure. It is also a much more diverse and services-oriented economy, which typically drives the expansion of digital services.
Nigeria has a relatively undiversified trade profile beyond oil and is therefore highly reliant on imported technology. However, it is benefitting from extensive investment in ICT, including 3G network coverage, and is expanding into hardware manufacturing and software development. South Africa, with its relatively large and diverse economy and extensive and high quality mobile broadband infrastructure, remains the leader of the four countries in most areas.
Industry analysis
The manufacturing, energy and transport industries showed varied levels of maturity and were reviewed based on the culture of innovation, digital operations and digital customer and offerings.
Manufacturing was the most mature. The adoption level of smart technologies that can accelerate Industry 4.0 remain at a foundation stage, however awareness of the significance and potential of this exponential technology is high.
In the energy sector, it is noted that without stable electricity it is challenging to do anything digitally. Some of the main challenges facing the African power industry are related to unreliable generation capacity, costly transmission, unskilled workforces and underdeveloped customer and billing management systems. Digitalisation can assist in enabling decentralised power generation to work, using alternate energy sources combined with intelligent grid management.
In the transport sector, new ways of using existing infrastructure more efficiently are being enabled through digitalisation. The rail and road sectors need to move beyond electrification and automation to true digitalisation and focus on extending and integrating islands of excellence to solve the real mobility needs of citizens.
Key findings from the report include:
• In an African context, disruptive technology drives development rather than disruption. Developed economy solutions are not necessarily going to work in underdeveloped economies. In Africa especially, true innovation comes from necessity.
• Conventional global views of digitalisation are being reimagined for local fit – glocalised digitalisation. Advanced technologies offer the opportunity to solve socio-economic problems.
• Digitalisation in Africa will only happen in small isolated areas unless governments drive overarching policies to ensure consistency of standards.
For more information contact Jennifer Naidoo, Siemens Southern Africa, +27 (0)11 652 2795, jennifer.naidoo@siemens.com, www.siemens.co.za
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