Now that I have a few minutes, let me dig in. I forecast this impending failures in one of the blogs in 2009 and 2010, and as usual, I was branded a pessimist. But I also see a situation where if the ICT firms (read ISP's, we are all endangered, BTW) run on an outsourced model (*"IT is handling your complaint"*) and they reduce the salaries and bonuses, and run on a mass model, eventually they'll turn the corner. I don't know why AK doesn't have dongles on the market, the ones that use Wimax. I would say its probably poor oversight from the management. Under PS Bitange Ndemo, it would not be hard to find such approval. We are lucky the top most CEO's in the government (PS's) are tech savvy to a recommended level for a couple of years now. Unfortunately, an under performing ICT sector means more job and revenue losses for an extremely poor, politically expanded and nonperforming economy. I am very worried that Safaricom is selling computers because my money will most likely end up in Jersey (Mobitelea) and Great Britain (Vodafone). One thing we should all be positive about is that even in the USA, we have Cyber Cafe's. When we learn how cyber's have managed to survive in the face of assault from mobile companies Internet (for an array of mobile gadgets), we'll be able to restructure organizations and align business to today's needs. I don't foresee the death of emerging ICT firms, but since our economy is small (and baiting your competitor is allowed! gee), playing at a regional level will be their strength (they call it economies of scale!). For the rest of Kenyans, we have a few choices left - we all get employed to large ICT firms or regional conglomerates like Google, HP, M$, PG, McDonald's, Voda, blah - that have learned to fly like eagles - up up up there in the sky - while watching the predators. Peter On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 7:48 PM, Joseph McDonald <mcdonaldoj@gmail.com>wrote:
@ Brian ....Exactly you have hit the nail on the head.Because one of the solutions is to
A)* stretch the organization*,by bench marking against non-telcom organization...e.g Access Kenya should put an objective of competing with say Stanchart in automation or compete with Safaricom in profits.Restructure like KCB etc.(but you must have a plan)
B) *Set goals that will cause change to occur*.Many telcos have a sales target only instead of end to end throughout the organization.Also set goals that you think your competitor will use to attack or beat you with.
C)* Invest in good systems and training* (systems across the whole enterprise to drive change in operating expenses (opex) and flexibility).Many organization invest in routers,mast,fibre and forget all the other departments .