Electricity + Control January 2017

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LIGHT + CURRENT
Digitalisation set to develop Africa, not disrupt
Siemens has conducted an African Digitalisation Maturity Report to
better determine a digitalisation benchmark across four countries
namely South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia as well as key
vertical industries – transport, manufacturing and energy.
At a briefing held in Sandton, Johannesburg, on 7 December 2016,
CEO Siemens Southern Africa, Sabine Dall’Omo, said that the four
countries were selected as some of the fastest growing economies
in Africa, as well as having made great strides in ICT (Information
and CommunicationsTechnology) adoption.
“Africa’s rapid urbanisation represents an immense opportunity
for the extension of ICT and improvement of digital maturity to help
urban hubs such as Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi andAddis Ababa
cope with the influx of inhabitants.
“There is an opportunity for government as well as the private
sector to roll out services for digital access and use, exactly as they
do with traditional basic services infrastructure,” said Dall’Omo.
For us, digitalisation means using new technologies like data
analytics, the cloud and the Internet ofThings to merge the virtual
and real worlds.This enables us to offer our customers substantial
productivity increases across their entire value chain, from design
and engineering to sales, production and service. In concrete terms,
this means faster time-to-market, greater flexibility and enhanced
availability of our products and systems for our customers.
In Africa, the challenge lies in applying digitalisation in the
context of various macro-economic factors such as regulation and
infrastructure,” said Dall’Omo. The report measures the extent to
which each country has a business, legal and regulatory environ-
ment that supports and protects the development of digitalisation
in key industries. This includes indicators such as the overall ease
of doing business, the presence and regulation of ICT-related laws,
the protection of intellectual property and evidence of ICT-related
innovation and start-up activities.
Quality of infrastructure indicators include access to international
bandwidth, mobile-network coverage, internet and mobile phone
penetration and the costs of broadband and mobile-phone access.
Skills are another vital component of maturity. We believe that
Digitalisation can bridge the blue and white collar worker, to create
what is termed the ‘grey collar’ worker added Sabine.
“This implies humans and machines not competing for jobs, but
rather working together and creating the need for a new type of
talent.The challenge is whether or not government and industry are
investing enough into the development of these skills.”
Country Analysis
While the larger and more developed economies tend to be more
digitally mature the analysis shows there are many indicators that
can influence a country’s ability to capitalise on digitalisation. If
done correctly it can drive entrepreneurial competition in market.
While Ethiopian and Kenyan economies are of a similar size and
are growing at similar rates, Kenya is ahead in terms of digital ma-
turity. This is attributed to the country having far more extensive
ICT infrastructure and mobile internet or 3G infrastructure to access
and secondly because it is much more diverse and services-oriented
economy, which typically drives the expansion of digital services.
Nigeria has a relatively undiversified trade profile beyond oil
and is therefore highly reliant on imported technology, however it
is benefitting from extensive investment in ICT, including 3G net-
work coverage and is expanding into hardware manufacturing and
software development.
South Africa with its relatively large and diverse economy and ex-
tensive and high quality mobile broadband infrastructure, remains
the leader of the four countries in most areas.
Industry Analysis
The manufacturing, energy and transport industries showed varied
levels of maturity and was reviewed based on the culture of innova-
tion, digital operations and digital customer and offerings.
Manufacturing was the most mature.The adoption level of smart
technologies that can accelerate the next industrial revolution glob-
ally termed Industry 4.0 remain at a foundation stage, however
awareness of the significance and potential of this exponential tech-
nology is high. In the energy sector, it is noted that without stable
electricity it is challenging to do anything digitally. Some of the main
challenges facing theAfrican power industry are related to unreliable
generation capacity, costly transmission, limited skilled workforces
and underdeveloped customer and billing management systems.
Digitalisation can assist in enabling decentralised power genera-
tion to work using alternate energy sources combined with intelligent
gridmanagement. In the transport sector, newways of using existing
infrastructure more efficiently are being enabled through digitalisa-
tion.The rail and road sectors need tomove beyond electrification and
automation to true digitalisation and focus on extending and integrat-
ing islands of excellence to solve the real mobility needs of citizens.
Key recommendations from the report to accelerate digitalisa-
tion include:
• In an African context, disruptive technology drives develop-
ment rather than disruption. Developed economy solutions are
not necessarily going to work in more under-developed econo-
mies. In Africa, especially, true innovation comes from necessity
• Glocalised digitalisation − conventional global views of digitali-
sation are being re-imagined for local-fit. Advanced technologies
offer the opportunity to solve great socio-economic problems and
should be considered in Africa’s diverse and developing countries
• Digital in Africa is poised to happen in small isolated areas
unless governments drive overarching policies to ensure con-
sistency of standards.
The report is available upon request.
Enquiries: Keshin Govender.Tel. +27 (0) 11 654 2412 or email keshin.
or visit
CEO Siemens Southern Africa, Sabine
Dall’Omo.
CEO Siemens
Southern Africa,
Sabine Dall’Omo.
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