Unlocking the potential of mobility in Africa

I believe that Africa represents the greatest Enterprise Mobility opportunity for any network operator anywhere in the world today, it is one the last great opportunities, all MNCs are waking up to Africa, they are economically challenged in their traditional markets and are now looking for ways to sustain and grow their own organisations.

All MNCs want to control their costs, the current economic environment makes this a necessity, they also want to find new ways to interact with their customers, ways to improve responsiveness, they want to improve the speed and efficiency of their processes and realise that mobility gives them an opportunity to step ahead of their competition and win in their own market.

It’s easy to throw statistics in the air about Africa – GDP growth, internet penetration, these always generate a real “wow factor”, on their own they mean nothing, they are just numbers, just think for a moment about why this may really be an opportunity for what many still see as just mobile phone sellers.

I believe it’s quite simple, I see two distinct things coming together to create this environment, one on the demand side and one on the supply side.

1. On the demand side – Less than 5% of MNCs have a clearly defined mobile strategy that focusses on how mobility can help them differentiate through innovation, yet all have a very clear strategy to contain costs and stop people using it.
2. On the supply side – All the network operators have invested literally billions of dollars building their networks, the large corporations all want to use it more, they want access to mobile email, the ability to work flexibly, in principle they want to be connected wherever they are whenever they want

But, something is stopping them, to unlock this opportunity I think there has to be a change of mind-set in the industry; I believe that mind-set change is all about innovation.

Innovation and winning typically go hand in hand, where battles are won its typically because someone has innovated in some way to gain an advantage over their adversary, for example wars have been won by innovations in technology, academic innovation enables better levels of education, innovation in sporting technology allows one team or one individual to go quicker, faster or higher so they can win and beat their competitors.

I believe that innovation has to be sustainable and part of the company culture; corporate success in the coming years will depend on faster responsiveness to customers, shareholders and employees. Mobile technology is now at the heart of all communications it delivers faster responsiveness, it can help to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction and increase profitability, why, because all these improve a corporate’s chances of winning through ever faster responsiveness.

Africa has not developed the in the same way as other countries, the ubiquity of infrastructure that enables  all large businesses to operate had never been built, fixed connectivity is not effectively unlimited but it is without doubt mobile!

We asked our customers what they thought and we found that their demands were no different to their counterparts in other countries, they wanted things their wider organisations took for granted but were challenged in this environment they had in many ways given up and were now looking for help, they wanted help in four key areas

1. Commercial innovation – MNC’s feel that the pricing structures presented to them stop them using the mobile networks. The mobile operators typically inherited their pricing structures from their fixed line predecessors, being built 30, 50 or even 100 years ago they are no longer relevant in the current world where apps are built by the minute, cross border working is a necessity and we all demand immediacy. MNC’s want us to provide real commercial alternatives that are simple to understand, consistent in delivery and predictable in use, they give examples such as fixed price per user irrespective of usage, easy to understand commercially viable prices for usage, in some cases just a fixed price for the whole organisation irrespective of number of users or amount of consumption. The scale of the larger operators enables them to take this risk and manage it by arbitrage, they now need to deliver these offers in Africa and make them available to MNC’s this unlocks the potential of what the technology can deliver.
2. Technical innovation – All CIOs and CTOs want to be able to see where all their mobile devices are, how many are not being used, what network they are on, what they are being used for, what software the devices are running, where there are security loopholes and then update them automatically over the air, what if this could be displayed in one simple and easy to understand web portal? No one really believes this can be done until they see it but it is available now.
3. Service innovation – MNCs all want a SLA, when all the major providers in the IT eco-system  offer this as standard operators have to deliver this in the mobile world, MNCs want a SLA hardwired into their contracts and what’s more they want just one contract, they don’t want multiple contracts all with different SLAs, they want just one, a MSA.
4. Product innovation – This was such a pain point for one of the major banks, their hypothesis was that all innovation was happening in the mobile world and they wanted an operator  to help them remove the barriers to adoption and the world of possibility would open up. When we start to consider the impact of machines on our lives this becomes an even greater opportunity, there are 7Bn people in the world today, when you consider the impact that there are 3Bn devices having some sort of mobile connection just consider the impact of 50Bn machines starting to connect to the mobile networks, all having demands for maintenance, toner, coffee, canned drinks and all sorts of other consumables just think how much the mobile networks can change how these processes work, machines will be able to ask for service instead of waiting for someone to come and service them. There is also the opportunity that mHealth opens up, how it can enable better distribution of the drugs that save lives, how it can help reduce the multi-billion dollar costs of drug trials by ensuring they are done effectively and efficiently, so much money is lost on wasted trials because the patient takes the drug at the wrong time or records the wrong behaviour, mobile applications can ensure the right things are done at the right time and in the right way by prompting the user and then capturing the correct inputs, this alone will save millions of dollars for Pharma customers and far more importantly save lives.

In summary

• No one argues that the future will be mobile; there will be more broadband, more connectivity and more new applications.
• I can find no one that argues Mobile will drive the next wave of business productivity innovation, just like laptops did in the 90’s, desktops in the 80’s, mainframes in the 70’s and slide rules before them.
• Generation X and Y will not know wires they will only know wireless.
• The future is in our hands, it is mobile the key is to provide the multi nationals across this continent to see through the fog of complex pricing structures and service delivery technology that the operators present to their customers.