Mereja.Forum

Ethiopia can only be transformed when the constituent elements are transformed well, the whole is the sum total of the parts.

The problem is how to transform the many different elements to achieve the overall transformation successfully, this takes a well designed and planned transformation plan.

PM Abiy Ahmed's government seems to have designed the way on how to tackle the effort of transforming Ethiopia, piece by piece and step by step.

You can't oversee the transformation the country is going through step by step, from ground on. If everybody draws a lesson and start to transform (it is more about thinking paradigm than physical effort and the money needed to do the job) its share, the country can be a very different place in a short time.

Today it is mainly Addis, but the knowledge gained here will be transferred to the rest of the cities and towns of the country. That is when the country as a whole will be transformed.

Ministry of Mines & Energy is taking a step in this direction and transforming its headquarter. I am not even sure if the headquarter is still the same old building around Mexico Adebaby(?) but the difference is vivid.

People may think that this is the (ultimate) goal of transforming a business, which a ministry of a state is one of it.

Just watching this video one can see that there are still a lot more to do and through that achieve the transformation of the country.

You see the number of file folders filling the whole of the shelves, they tried to make it some how easier for the workers to do their job by coloring the folders.

They built a beautiful building and decorated the interior and exterior to make it attractive for both the employees and the customers (visitors).

But at the same time those folders are telling us how primitive the way we still do business in the year 2021, the rest of the world would laugh at us on this.

IT has been around for almost half a century or longer and ubiquitous for at least 20 to 30 years, in the western world every business, including private and family businesses have been totally digitalized.

One key role of IT is simplification of business processes and optimization of businesses.

The lady in the video was saying that they do deploy software and the folders are just "backups". This is unfortunately something like ከእጅ አይሻል ዶማ type.

You either automate your business process whole and take advantage of IT support or do it still the old way per hand, the possibility that you can do half of the job electronically and the other half with hand (using paper and file folders) is next to null. You make only more cost here by deploying two tools in parallel. You pay the workers and at the same time also deploy IT-Tools, without realizing the value of IT.

Otherwise you can't achieve any sort of optimization of your process, there is another big risk of failing to ensure consistency of your business data, which could lead to a fatal consequence by itself. Consistency of business data is crucial.

This is a very big topic but I repeat it here also that Ethiopia needs to start investing in transformation of its business processes and digitalization endeavors.

For those who missed the previous post because of language barrier, here one more time in Amharic as well.