May the real BPOs please stand up

Frost and Sullivan, a respected research and management consultancy firm based in the US, predicts that the full impact of the economic slowdown will be felt by the outsourcing industry in the coming year or two. And advises that outsourcers must be quick enough to react to developing conditions and rethink business strategies if they are to maintain growth in the face of a slowing global economy.

I suspect Michael Joseph, Safaricom’s CEO read this report and went ahead to make a rather unpopular business decision among the local Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) community. This decision was to invest and manage an Sh800 million ultra-modern call centre; his motive, to be able to answer 85 percent of all customer care calls within the first 20 seconds of the first ring. This to me, reads like a move to increase operational efficiencies. Over the last one year, Safaricom has been accused of poor customer care and ever engaged customer care lines and therefore a dedicated call centre to solve customer problems is a welcome addition.

It is, however, interesting that Safaricom decided to invest huge sums of money in a service that could have been easily out sourced, or so you think. Safaricom defied experts and global best practices, in making this decision and that is probably what Frost and Sullivan are talking about. I’m reminded that they actually wanted to go that way and even put out a tender sometime last year for a BPO operator to run the call centre. With BPO profiled as a pillar within the Vision 2030, it would have been politically correct for Safaricom to go that way, but they chose to a different route.

So why did Michael Joseph chose to go against the grain? Here allow me to speculate since I’m not the man who manages the company that has in three consecutive years won the East African most respected company award. As stated earlier, Safaricom had no intention of running the call centre. They even did not want to invest in putting it up in the first place and were going to work smart by outsourcing this non-core activity to the experts, read the BPO operators. But after putting out a tender for this work twice, they realized that they could not identify an operator who was ready for their kind of work.

It has been reported in different media that the local BPO operators could neither meet the technical specifications nor the pricing expectation. Something that reminds me of an observation I made a while back on this new economic sector that most BPOs were founded on unsustainable business models and lack vision. It is estimated that more than 75% of the existing BPOs were formed after the Government through the Kenya ICT Board announced that they would provide subsidies to BPOs as a way of growing the sector in line with the Vision 2030. So to expect companies that were formed on this premise and looking out for Government handouts to invest in the kind of infrastructure that Safaricom was looking for is to say the least, a long shot.

Then, there is the issue of focus. BPOs in the country have been spending too much time looking for business outside the country that they seem to have forgotten to build capacity in their operations and look for business locally. There are many organisations like Safaricom who would like to outsource there non-core but are stuck to them because there are no suitable suitors. It is my humble submission that there is need for the BPO sector to reorganize and restrategise for it to play a meaningful role in the development of the country and to contribute effectively in our ambitious vision 2030.

Whose Internet

Last week was a rather interesting week for policy makers in the region, especially those who have taken time to understand internet governance issues. From the onset, everyone seems to know what internet governance is all about, but the moment you dig deeper and start asking hard questions, you start getting very interesting answers of how the internet cannot actually be governed.

But is this what internet governance really means? Internet Governance does not refer to governance in the "policing" sense or "control" of the internet as one would think, no. A working group established after the UN-initiated WSIS defined internet governance as "the development and application by governments, private sector and civil society, in their respective rules, shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the internet.  

So IG stems from the realisation that the internet is a scarce and valuable resource that each country and stakeholder needs access to and therefore needs policies and mechanisms acceptable to all players to promote its growth, maintain its stability and secure it. And that is what Internet Governance is all about...let me know what you think.

Opening the Internet Governance Debate in East Africa

October has been an interesting month on issues of Internet Governance. For the first time, the region, that is Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi are discussing issues around Internet Governance in preparation for a regional meeting and later a global forum for the same.

The issues around IG have been around for a while, but were probably prioritised after the second WSIS meeting in Tunis, Tunisia where the UN Secretary was mandated to form a forum for stakeholders to dialogue around issues around the way the internet is managed. This forum is currently non-policy making, however, alot of issues discussed in the forum find there way into global policies.

The region has not hard an opportunity to prepare and think issues through and identify issues that are important and common across East Africa. So having a regional meeting that aims to have a common position for East Africa, is to say the least exciting. Kenya held its National IG on the 14th of October, Tanzania followed with its version on the 22nd of October. Rwanda and Uganda are set to have their own on the 29th of October after which the issues identified will be collated and discussed at a regional meeting in Nairobi between 10-12 November. I Cant wait for this. 

ICT Policy Harmonisation a must for regional integration

There will be no regional integration without ICT, these were the words of the Deputy Secretary General of the East African Community when addressing stakeholders at the Policy Review workshop in Nairobi today. To have ICT work for the region, there is need to harmonise policies that will help achieve the goal of the EAC to widen and deepen economic, political and cultural integration in order to improve the quality of life of the people of the region through increased competitiveness.

Energy critical for success of e-Government

I have heard about it from colleagues and partners, but it had never happened in front of my eyes before, in between a very crucial session in a workshop on ICT for Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, the self proclaimed capital city of Africa and viola, an unprecedented power blackout that turns the meeting room into a dark room, akin to film production studios and forces the interpreters to move out of their interpretation booth and join the distinguished participants to push the meeting agenda forward, albeit briefly.

This got me thinking:  if we can have a blackout in the capital of the continent, which renders all communication networks unusable or provides just limited connectivity, is the continent really ready for e-Government which is highly dependent on electricity?

Yes, I hear you; one can use backup power, diesel-power generator or may be solar; just to report that none of these were available for our meeting. In Nairobi, we normally take these alternative power sources very seriously to avoid such embarrassing situations.

Moral of the story? As we plan to implement e-government in our countries, it is critical that we do this in tandem with the roll out of electricity so that we are not caught in a situation where we down our fancy, efficient, highly productive  e-Government tools for archaic traditional, inefficient  systems.  Without fear of contradiction, I would dare recommend that Governments reviewing their e-Government strategies should include a component of provision of energy...mainstream or alternative.

Digital Villages: Serious potential for e-Government

They have since been rebranded to Pasha Centres, translating to information centres or if you are like me, information access centres. This is in realisation that the digital villages are not a technological event or activity but an investment that has the potential of opening up government and effectively offer public service to the remotest village in the country.

But what the Pasha Centres are has been a subject of discussion and even controversy since the initial concept was unveiled more than a year ago. Listening to ten different people involved in the project talking about the Centres, one could be excused to thinking that its ten different projects that were being discussed.

With the kind of potential and interest from especially would be investors in the programme, the situation was to say the least worrying. I’m however, glad to report that this is quickly changing as the Kenya ICT Board took time to define, plan the deployment, roll-out, management and funding of the Pasha Centres. This to me was as refreshing as it was important.

It is almost official that the Pasha Centres will among other services offer online government services, plan are underway to link the Pashas with the implementation of e-Government in the country. This requires collaboration between the ICT Board and the Directorate of e-Government who are charged with the task of implementing e-Government in the country.

Turning traditional public services into online services is no mean task, it requires rationalisation, alignment and a sizeable investment in systems, people and re-engineering of processes within government and a massive awareness programme. This will take some time to be realised, but as long as we start walking in this direction in regard to the Pashas and e-Government, we shall get there in no time...so lets get going.

INVITATION - New Generation Organizational Models for eGovernment:

You are kindly invited to join us for a Global Dialogue workshop on New Generation Organizational Models for eGovernment: Emerging Role of Centers of Excellence. You can participate in person, via videoconference or live webcast or by sending questions to speakers in advance.

The event will take place at 09.30 - 12:30 am ET on April 1, 2008 in Washington D. C. (1818 H Street, N. W.). The event is organized by the e-Development Thematic Group/Global ICT Department of the World Bank in collaboration with GDLN, DGF, ECCB, IIS Russia, African eDevelopment Resource Centre in Kenya and other organizations.

Workshop Description.

Given the complexities of designing and implementing e-government applications, institutional structures are extremely important for achieving success. Traditionally, governments have established specialized ICT agencies/organizations to deal with technology issues in the public sector. Such agencies variously deal with policy, operational and procedural aspects of e-government. However, rapid changes taking place in technologies and business models, require a fundamental rethink of the organizational structures and institutional designs for ICT organizations supporting e-government. Apart from the public sector, the private sector has some useful lessons of experience to offer in this regard. For example, Integration/SOA Competency Centers are playing a useful role in rationalizing and coordinating IT
deployments, in cost effective and efficient ways.

This workshop will discuss the role of a new generation of e-government organizations which could extend the role of e-Government "Centers of Excellence" or "Competency Centers" in keeping with emerging technology and organizational trends. These organizations could potentially help expand and scale-up successful e-Government approaches, including
those using Service Oriented Architecture and Web 2.0 technologies. These "e-Gov 2.0" organizations could be designed as hybrids with flexible structures, drawing expertise from government agencies, academia, private sector and industry. The session intends to explore promising approaches to the design of such organisations drawing upon successful experiences from the private and public sectors. The session will discuss the applicability of such next
generation e-government organizations to different environments. In environments where e-Government projects are risky and, involve high level technical skills, and domain expertise, such approaches could effectively meld the business of government with new technologies and business models to achieve future oriented and high impact eGovernment applications.

The speakers will include:

Philippe Dongier, Sector Manager, Global ICT Dept., World Bank
Reinhard Posch, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Government of Austria (keynote address, via videoconference)
Randeep Sudan, Lead ICT Policy Specialist, Global ICT Dept., World Bank
Jaijit Bhattacharya, Country Director at Sun Microsystems India (via videoconference)
Samia Melhem (Moderator), Senior Operations Officer, Global ICT Dept., World Bank; and Chair, e-Development Thematic Group
Juan Navas Sabater, Senior Operations Officer, Global ICT Dept., World Bank

Additional information on this seminar, such as the agenda, speaker profiles and slides will be placed online as they become available at http://go.worldbank.org/2LA3GGGEA0.

Please note that a building pass will be required if you are attending in DC, and you can contact us at edevelopment@worldbank.org with your name and your institution's name so that a building pass will be requested prior to your arrival.

As an alternative, you can join us via live webcast and online discussion or in one of other participating cities (via videoconference). We can provide the list of cities, which will be connected, upon request.

The Live Webcast / e-Discussion and archived videoclip will be available at:
http://www.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live , please respond by email to confirm your participation in the webcast.

We look forward to your attendance!

e-Development TG Team

P.S. Feel free to forward this invitation to all who may be interested!