The growth of Africa’s economy and technology is not going unnoticed. It is not uncommon to come across people who refer to the continent as the land of the Next Billion Internet users. And to further emphasize all this, we have African startup unicorns sprouting on the daily.
Yet, corporations and businesses are still experiencing a lot of difficulties with data. In my Data & Machine Learning consulting experience, these generally span from the lack of data in some cases to an inability to leverage existing data. In this post, I discuss some of the data challenges big corporations in Africa face and hint at how to go about tackling them.
As a business, you first have to become Data Aware, then lay down a Data Strategy for how you can leverage Data to drive revenue.
Failure to treat data as a commodity
Corporations on the continent continue to neglect the value of their data. In some cases, we see top management reluctant to be data-driven for fear of losing their power. As a result, the use of data is limited to rudimentary use cases like reports for settling Service Level Agreements or customer complaints. These are good use cases, but as we move into what Azeem Azhar calls an “exponential age”, companies have to use their data to its full potential for a competitive advantage.
All this begins with adopting a data culture from the top, down to the smallest organizational units. Top managements have to accept to make the shift from being entirely experience-driven. And to strike a nice balance with data to evolve and adapt.
Limited Access to collected data
Data challenges for African businesses begin at the first step of the data-value chain — Data collection. In the case of big firms, the problem is a little different because there is at the very least, a decent data collection infrastructure. However, companies experience limitations ranging from the speed of data access to complete lack of access to their own data. Sounds funny, right? But very true and here’s why.
Big corporations either buy enterprise software that act as entry points for company data, or they completely outsource this to third-party service providers.
In the first case, an employee(s) has to get the necessary training to operate the software. Over time, change of personnel leads to a decrease in the operational expertise of the software. And the company could end up having an employee(s) who can handle day-to-day operations of company software but has difficulties in the face of a data crisis or a new data implementation project. Another problem this often creates is a segmented data problem. Making aggregation difficult since different business systems generate data independent of the others.
Outsourcing business systems to a third party resolves the aforementioned issues. Still, when things go south, there is the risk of losing complete access to the company’s data. This is why strategic partnerships and reputation are key when considering business system service providers.
Inadequate Data Storage facilities
Before talking about the issue of storing data, we must remember that big companies in Africa tend to be older companies. I am mentioning this because some of these big firms have very old data that is still stored in large physical files. And in that case, the very first data challenge is to digitize them. Once this is out of the way, the next step is to manage storage.
8 in 10 big firms have an internal data center — a paradigm that is declining with the emergence of cloud computing. The problem with these is that they are difficult to maintain (patching servers, updates, backups, etc.) and result in large data losses. Usually, this results from either poor maintenance or outright lack of storage capacity to keep historical data.
Processing & Analysis
Data processing and Analysis are not cheap. The expertise and tools required to leverage data need huge investments that big corporations are not willing to make. The main reason for this is because C-level executives are uncertain about the benefits and the long-term usage.
Nonetheless, this is changing. We see newer big firms like Kudi embracing data around their organizational strategies. And putting it to use via cutting-edge products and services that older competition could not imagine possible.
Untrained Talent
I decided to talk about this last because it cuts across all the other challenges mentioned. There is no doubt that we have the talent on the continent to solve our pressing data challenges. But, educational systems continue to fail woefully in closing the gap between enterprise skillsets and the foundational knowledge taught in schools.
This leaves companies unable to find the local expertise they need to put in place their data strategies. Luckily, in recent years we are seeing more and more specialized professional training institutions come in to fill this gap. A few examples include Port Harcourt School of AI (Nigeria), Zalego Academy (Kenya), and Seven Advanced Academy (Cameroon).
The lack of organizational data strategy is the most pertinent data challenge Africa’s top firms face.
That said, the good news is that the private sector is championing the race for data-driven culture amongst big corporations. Banks and Telcos seem to be following closely, as data awareness is on the uprise, but more time and financial investment still need to be put in.
In my opinion, in the next 4 years, we will see a majority of big companies embrace data for at least one pertinent business use case. This will allow Governments, to follow suit and should pave the way towards data-driven decision-making in Africa as a whole.
Thanks for reading, feel free to share and connect with me on LinkedIn.
