Technology

Eating an elephant

Digital transformation of one company is hard enough, so imagine trying to drive that process across the entire economy.

26 August 2021

The past 18 months or so have seen our parlance filled with a host of new terms, from ‘social distancing’ to ‘Covidiots’. But in the two to three years prior to t hat, t he p hrase getting all the attention, especially in political circles, was ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, or 4IR. There’s a 4IR Project Management Office, the Minister of Communications and Digital Technology – who calls herself the ‘4IR Commander’ – has expressed a desire to build a 4IR army, and we’ve even had a presidential commission on it. Of course, a cynic will argue that we’ve got official commissions or inquiries into everything these days. But the presidential commission, made up of academic, industry and political leaders, worked over the course of a year and produced a broad-ranging report providing recommendations and a roadmap for turning South Africa’s limping economy on to a new trajectory.

Brilliant, another report that our politicians have commissioned, but without the necessary implementation, as usual, it will ultimately end up a waste of everyone’s time, our trusty cynic would undoubtedly argue. Well, that’s not the view everyone’s taking. Various organisations and businesses are looking to build on the report’s foundations and have formed a new non-profit enterprise specifically mandated to drive digital transformation across South Africa.

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