If an innovation focused firm, is solely interested in the most effective application and value addition of ICT technology, in west Africa.

It ought to look beyond ICT capital expenditure and investment, but also into the value that is being added.

Insight into the ICT deployment in Nigeria, has made me come to a conclusion that a lot needs to be done, for us to realise or rip the benefits of ICT. In my study of all sectors and their relationship with ICT, we came about a metric that make us easily quantify how well benefits are being ripped from ICT.  The metric is EvVA which simply means ‘Expenditure vs Value added.

The value of EvVA is measured in a XX:XX format. I believes that the minimum value for  EvVA, for any ICT investment is 100:100. This value or ratio basically means value derived equals expenditure.

Below is a graph depicting a 100:100 EvVA value of the capital investment of a company XYZ.

From the graph, we can see that the expenditure and the added value have a relationship of direct proportionality. A scenario like this simply shows that the ICT is efficient and is adding needed value.

Sadly, this is not the typical case in ICT investment here in Nigeria, especially in the public sector. As a matter of fact, the reality is far from a 100:100 EvVA. This sad scenario cuts across all sectors of the government. From education, legal and ministries.

 

 

From my research and case studies of ICT projects in Nigeria, which I have been indirectly involved in, I can affirm that the average EvVA value of an average ICT project in Nigeria especially in the public sector is 100:20EvVA.

Year in year out, Nigeria waste billions of Naira in its ICT investments. This sad truth will go on and on, except a new ICT deployment process is adopted.

The CDM process in Nigeria’s ICT projects.

CDM simply translates to Consultation – Deployment – Management. These are the key phases of an ICT project here in Nigeria.

Consultation

The consultation phase is typically flawed due to vested interest, and also lack of competent personnel with required insight in ICT.

Deployment

This phase is when the ICT contract have been awarded to a systems integration ICT frim, that has the manpower and skill to deploy the solutions proposed from the consultation.

Typically the company is a partner to a OEM such as Cisco systems, Juniper Networks, Dell etc. The company will install and activate the ICT infrastructure and then hand it over to the client. This seems to be a straight forward process, but in a country like Nigeria, this approach has repeatedly poses enormous inefficiency related issues.  Mostly, the sophistication of the deployed network is normally more advanced than the ICT team it was handed over too.

These normally results to the ICT setup being underutilized, hence drastically reducing the EvVA metric. ICT engineers of the deployment company are normally far skilled and competent than the client’s local engineers.

Management

This phase is when the entire project have been signed of and handed to the client. From this moment onward, the EvVA metric beings to nose dive.

I have been to several data centers, that are well invested, and we observed that the sophistication of what was deployed is not fully realized. It was evident that when the initial planning was put in place, there were forward thinking intentions, but no able and willing hands to sustain the intentions.

In conclusion, the CDM must be looked into, what do you think?

Author: Edward Banjo