IoT: African countries urged to embrace new technologies

FOR African countries to become more competitive and not play catch ups, the various governments have been urged to as a matter of urgency, leapfrog to the new technologies, especially the Internet of Things (IoT) that has become the new form of disruption in the global technology world.
   
Apart from the IoT enhancing living standards, a new economic analysis by Cisco revealed that the Internet of Everything or IoT is a $4.6 trillion opportunity for global public-sector organizations over the next decade, as a result of cost savings, increased productivity, new revenues and enhanced citizen experiences.
 
As such, the advice for African countries to embrace IoT was given on Monday, during the opening ceremony of the ongoing 35th GITEX Technology Week in Dubai, UAE, where Nigeria is represented, through the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the government agency responsible for the implementation of Information Technology (IT) policy in Nigeria.
   
The call for African countries to embrace the technology of IoT by the forum became necessary, following innovations that are driving business efficiency and profitability that are invariably disrupting the old ways of doing businesses globally.
 
Vice President of Alibaba Group,  Sicheng Yu, who spoke on ‘The Future of Innovation and the Converging Forces of Change,’ said: “The world is currently experiencing a number of converging forces that will both rewrite the rules of business and redefine the world of innovation. Each of these driving forces has the potential of blindsiding us if we do not spend time crafting stories about the world to come.”
   
He was of the view that the technology of IoT would in the future, help cars to communicate with other cars on the roads and help in decongesting traffic caused by vehicular movements.
   
Yu said more innovations were on the way, and urged African countries to key into the innovation, by promoting big data, cloud computing and the Internet. We are already experiencing increase in the demand for big data services across the globe but big data cannot work effectively, without cloud computing that is largely driven by the internet, Yu said. He promised that Alibaba Group would continue to use its platform to make system and applications work faster for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), in order to create business efficiency that will drive down cost of business.
   
The Chief Technology Officer of Accenture, Paul Daugherty, who spoke on ‘Transformation in the Digital Business Era,’ said global companies are reimagining and strategically transforming into digital businesses in order to achieve internal efficiencies, external growth and return to the role of disrupters.”

He highlighted the need for digital transformation across globe and explained that the globe needed three mega trends that would shape businesses.
   
The trends according to him would include connected world, data connectivity as well as intelligence and automation. He said over 3.5 billion people were already connected to the Internet, but that the figure would double very soon, following the innovations that the IoT technology would bring.
   
The Jobs Report for December 2014 reported that 252,000 US jobs were created in December alone, and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.6 per cent. IoE will only add to these numbers, as it will require companies to grow and expand their skill-set to hire professionals who possess the skills needed to properly implement the technology. All of this job growth will also boost the gross domestic product of twenty of the world’s largest economies by 2030 by an additional $14 trillion.
   
IoE will also open the doors for more corporate training sessions, creating an additional set of jobs – IoE trainers. And, in order for IoE to be implemented, we can expect to see IoE-specific engineers, IT personnel and the creation of entire vendors that are just focused on advancing IoE.
 
IoE is shifting the industry, both from a technology standpoint and within the enterprise. It is not just creating more robust and innovative technologies, it is also creating an entirely new field of jobs that have never been seen before. It is opening up doors for even more job development and growth in technology fields in all industries, and is allowing for the cross-pollination of the C-Suite and IT teams.