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Digitisation best practice for enterprise

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March 2020, I responded to a distress call from Mama Mbogas (women vegetable vendors) in Westlands area of Nairobi. The impact of the lockdown as a result of Covid-19 pandemic had severely affected their business and they did not have access to their customers. Like many others in the MSEs sector, the women were looking for a solution.

We trained nine of them on how to repurpose WhatsApp into an online sales platform. And how they could use it to get to their customers. While piloting, a flurry of orders started to come through. To complete the newfound channel of distribution, we trained five motorbike taxis on how to locate addresses with Google Maps. They became instant logistics partners to Mama Mbogas.

Simple as it sounds, the women had created a wide social network that is now sustaining their enterprises through the pandemic. The simple act of goodness now confirms the fact that whether your enterprise is micro, small, medium or large, you simply have to transform to the new era and that is to be digital.

In some of the social networks that have emerged out of the crisis, you can virtually get any product or services you need online. And now large enterprises are slowly turning to home delivery too.

Even though digitalising of a micro enterprise can be quite simple, for small, medium and large entities it can be more complex than they can ever imagine. A German company, Statista, specialising in market and consumer data estimates that between 2020 and 2024, the direct investments into digitalisation are projected to reach a total $7.8 trillion.

This investment in digitalisation could be higher since everything in an enterprise including cash transfer is soon becoming digital. In the next few years, only few can survive without embracing digital technology. Covid-19 has plunged many organisations into a digitalised environment.

The purpose of this article is to share some of the best practices for medium and large organisations to cope with digitalisation.

First, one has to have a plan a head of time with clear goals. In some cases, it helps to minimise cost by leasing software, computing capacity and storage.

Unfortunately, in practice, most organisations approach digitalisation in piecemeal and often with outright purchase of software and hardware. A strategy that fails to integrate processes.

And in their efforts to meet sales targets, vendors sometimes go overboard to the extent that organisations buy information they don’t need. This often happens when organisations invest before assessing needs.

As a result, their investment in systems ends up in silos and always in duplicated solutions that are in conflict with each other. Digitalization objective is to integrate digital technology into all areas of a business. It also involves automating processes, use of technological devices for communication and collaboration.

A good system always adds value to a customer. To maximise value creation, it pays to hire a consultant to conduct a gap analysis for systems implementation. In essence, it helps to minimise cost while benefiting from necessary applications.

Systems alone rarely deliver value to the customer. It requires a dedicated human resource that understands why the investment in systems has been made. There is also cost-saving in ensuring that employees see the value in leveraging technology to do their job.

This entails involving them from idea stage through testing to the implementation stage by ensuring that training and adaptation takes place. Failure to carry workers along could be very expensive. First because it provides a fertile ground for finding reason for resistance and it encourages conspiracy theories on how technology will replace them.

Digitalization is a critical cog to organisational sustainability.