Across West Africa, businesses are realising the need for comprehensive digitalisation. Information technology (IT) can no longer be relegated to just one department or team, as digital infrastructure, platforms, and services play an increasingly greater role in daily operations and achieving strategic objectives.
Case in point, earlier this year, Nigeria’s government announced it is working to reach 70% digitalisation by 2025 through public-private partnerships, not only enhancing its digital capabilities but also fostering innovation and national economic growth.
Effective business digitalisation is only possible when enterprises have people who can speak the language of both business and technology, and who have the resources and knowledge to lead change throughout the entire organisation. For an enterprise to be profitable, scalable, and relevant in the future, its human resources must be able to operate like one interconnected stream.
With the right approach to culture and IT service delivery, an emphasis on cultivating talent, and leveraging technologies such as automation, enterprises in West Africa can make that a reality.
Business accelerated
IT and applications playing such a critical role in business today. Enterprises need to be able to go from development to deployment as smoothly and efficiently as possible, not to mention giving teams the ability to oversee and maintain IT environments without overburdening them.
This is where the DevOps approach yields so much value on top of delivering value to the end user.
DevOps implies that development and operations teams combine forces to collaborate and overall optimise the production environment, automating routine tasks and speeding up workload processes.
Teams become more agile with regard to software, but also gain a more holistic perspective on the integration of services and how they work together.
Not every organisation may have separate development and operations teams, but DevOps represents an overhaul of an organisation’s entire culture.
It means sharing information and taking responsibility for shared decision-making. The result is a greater level of interconnectedness, with teams working together to service the organisation as a whole.
An in-house centre of excellence
In the face of a shortage of essential IT and digital skills, many companies across West Africa take matters into their own hands by operating their own training and upskilling initiatives. By doing so, they retain capacity and control over the quality of the skills that they have access to.
One organisation I know of has even gone so far as to create its own automation centre of excellence (CoE), consolidating resources from all business units to identify where the organisation can implement automation to increase performance, productivity, and efficiency.
By creating a pool of knowledge that informs their automation journey, combined with automation platforms that allow for enterprise-wide adoption, companies have the means to fully realise their automation ambitions.
CoEs not only help fill explicit skills gaps, but also move organisations to a higher level of IT maturity. For example, a CoE could assist organisations in adopting a hybrid cloud architecture, combining environments so that the organisation can access the resources they need.
Automation brings the enterprise together
A trap that many businesses fall into with their digital transformation plans is relying heavily on fragmented, single-use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools, resulting in workflows becoming unnecessarily complicated and infrastructure becoming more complex, all while running the risk of incompatibility.
Businesses can avoid this with a unified foundation that facilitates all IT processes while giving them the opportunity to expand new digitalisation initiatives across the whole organisation. For example, using an automation platform, businesses can create, deploy, and share automation content at scale.
It also enables them to centralise and control their IT infrastructure while eliminating the potential for deployment to be inoperable.
This is enterprise IT being a force for interconnectivity and collaboration in West African enterprises. By leveraging the right platforms and aligning their approach with business automation, companies can get the most out of new technologies.
