It has been an eventful first month for me here at Vista Group. I was given a very warm welcome, by employees and staff I have met in the following verticals; Vishwamitra, BlueCrest College, NIIT, Vista 2000 Ghana Ltd and most recently Academic City College on my recent trip to Accra. This months focus has been on web assets :- the websites of
http://r4africa.com, http://accghana.com and http://artemislife.com have all received a cosmetic uplift and optimized speed. There is an overall sense of enthusiasm towards digital transformation that I get from initial interactions I have had this month as Chief Transformation Officer. In many cases, department leaders have a forward-looking ethos (signature of the Vista and Eureka teams), are already aware of digital and technology solutions in the market that can improve the administrative and management functions of those businesses, and some have taken the lead in testing/prototyping these technologies in-house. Whilst underlying systems are adequate and reliable at ‘enabling’ business functionality (such as Entrust & Tally), my aim over this year will be to implement solutions that can encourage new business generation, connect teams for better collaboration, and ‘optimize’ business functionality. Further, technology and IT today have reached a crossroad of ‘mobile and data’ in the last few years which I want to capitalize on. Wherever we can improve information systems and data aggregation on assets, processes, employees and customers – the tools we are looking at should have the following criteria and this is the framework I use in my analyses: –
1) Speed – does tech make it faster to accomplish the tasks
2) Easy of Use – ease of understanding for non-IT people
3) Cost per User – is the tech a justifiable overhead cost
4) Data Aggregation – can we capture new business intelligence
5) Modularity – can the system fail without affecting business or other users
6) Stakeholders – is the tech inclusive across stakeholders
I am seeking ways to serve our stakeholders better. If in some cases the ‘less is more’ theory applies, or the ‘if its not broken don’t fix it’ adage persists, then I will largely be hands off – Technology is more useful when there is enough at stake, and only useful when WhatsApp can’t keep up with the level of complexity required! This month I have been reading the MIT digest on digital transformation entitled, “Strategy not Technology, Drives Digital Transformation”. In a nutshell, digitizing an enterprise is as much about understanding the enterprise’s business strategy and finding technology to complement this strategy. With that in mind, I look forward to meeting Vista in Nigeria, and the Artemis teams in Mozambique and Tanzania in the next month or two.
Vinay Gokaldas
