Thinking of going digital?
The rise of the emerging markets, the popularity of mobile devices, especially smart phones and the growth of social media are also compounding the economic impact of the internet the report says. BCG makes the case that businesses will be fundamentally transformed over the next five years. While that transformation might not be that dramatic […]
The rise of the emerging markets, the popularity of mobile devices, especially smart phones and the growth of social media are also compounding the economic impact of the internet the report says.
BCG makes the case that businesses will be fundamentally transformed over the next five years.
While that transformation might not be that dramatic in our local environment (talking about Nigeria and Africa), it’s time to take a look around you and evaluate your options.
You can’t deny the fact that more and more people are accessing the internet (internetworldstats.com reports that as of June 2010, there are 43,982,200 internet users, about 28.3% of the population) through PC and mobile devices. You can’t also ignore the growth of social media users in the country (Socialbakers.com reports that there are 4,244, 100 Facebook users in Nigeria, about 2.79% of the entire population and 9.65% of the internet population). This numbers are set to grow and usually they grow in multiple of 10s or 100s of percentages.
Also broadband (very fast internet connection) usage is growing even if it is at a slower pace compare with other more advanced countries. With the arrival of Main One and Glo One submarine cables and the launch of satellites NigeriaSat-2, NigeriaSat-X and NigcomSat 1R by the Nigerian Communications Satellite Limited, it’s only a matter of time before broadband internet becomes highly accessible to the general population.
Generally speaking you have the following options. It’s either you formulate and implement effective strategies that integrates your offline channels with online channels to form a multi-channel strategy that will help you increase revenues, cut cost and gain competitive advantage in your market place (note that you don’t have to go all out; you could test the waters with pilot projects before deploying big time) or you play the waiting game and lag behind your competitors who might have already gained the advantage in your market place.
Digital technologies such as internet could also be an intranet or an extranet, and mobile services could serve as channels to support various business processes.
Such business processes might include marketing and sales, human resource development and training, procurement, customer relationship management (managing your interactions with customers and prospects with the aim of improving their conversion, retaining them and increasing their value to you), change management (helping your employees to accept and embrace change in their current business environment) and knowledge management (getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and helping people create, share and act upon information in ways that will measurably improve the performance of your business).
It doesn’t matter if your business is very much localized, you could still gain immensely from going digital.
I will leave you with the words of David Dean, a coauthor of the BCG report and a senior partner at BCG. “No company or country can afford to ignore this development. Every business needs to go digital. The new internet is no longer largely Western, accessed from your PC. It is global, ubiquitous and participatory.”
Suleman S. Abdullahi writes from Proedice Limited and can be reached at Proedice.com