Turning Challenges Into Opportunities - Part Three

Government’s responsibility

Local African governments certainly also must review and transform their regulatory framework and work in closer partnership with the industry for affordability, and low cost solutions to network extension, in particular into remote areas; both are needed to ensure the poor can access mobile phones and benefit from services; The Economic crises must be a catalyst for change – Government and mobile operators must work together in transforming their partnership for reduction of current inefficiencies securing a continued increase in productivity.

Governments must react very quickly by lowering or eliminating tariffs on the import of equipment such as handsets and base stations and taxes generally. If you want to encourage something you don’t tax it. The best strategy for expanding government resources is to expand the economy, and this can best be accomplished by lowering the current barriers – legal, tax and regulatory – allowing the market and the private sector to grow.

New business model

To remain competitive in the global economy, you need to concentrate on what made you successful in the first place – your core business. You can't afford to expend valuable time and energy managing transactions and noncore process that could be handled by other specialists. Operators are all seeking to survive and become low cost providers of high quality services to its customer base, the winners in today’s difficult operating environment are operators who takes some of the immediate actions required including but not limited to:

Design and Investment in new business model
Leaner organization however with increased flexibility
Elimination of duplication between vendors and operators
Business process outsourcing
Undivided commitment to people development
Develop operational excellence in execution
Build stronger partnership relations with the government

Some of the key next steps for operators and vendors are to complete a shared end to end diagnostic of the transformation goals and development of the transformed business model.

The industry must use the current crisis as an ideal opportunity for dramatic change, become even stronger by leapfrogging into the future of Africa with a continued improvement of the quality of life for all people.

Do operators and vendors truly understand the complexity of change required, are management structure inefficient, are senior management overworked and lack the time to organize large scale change whilst concurrently allocating enough time and focus on managing the ongoing business?

People development

Above all operators and vendors must evaluate the organizational readiness and capability for delivery of the transformation objectives. Transformation is not to be just about downsizing but development of a smarter way of working. The success rate of any implementation of the transformation strategy rests with the capability of execution. Historically transformation projects fail to deliver the expected benefits at the rate of 70-80%, the overriding reason being the gap in operational execution capability. Businesses tends to contract with high level executive consultant firms who take a helicopter view, this often in isolation from the operational functions, this approach granted will deliver some immediate benefits yet again fail to deliver drastic and sustainable performance improvement.