ICTs for Productivity

ICTs for Productivity

“Innovation”: creativity; novelty; the process of devising a new idea or thing, or improving an existing idea or thing. Although the word carries a positive connotation … innovation, like all human activities, has costs as well as benefits. These costs and benefits have preoccupied economists, political philosophers, and artists for centuries. Innovation can turn new concepts into realities, creating wealth and power. For example, someone who discovers a cure for a disease has the power to withhold it, give it away, or sell it to others. Innovations can also disrupt the status quo, as when the invention of the automobile eliminated the need for horse-powered transportation. Joseph Scumpeter coined the term “CREATIVE DESTRUCTION” to describe the process by which innovation causes a FREE MARKET economy to evolve. Creative destruction occurs when innovations make long-standing arrangements obsolete, freeing resources to be employed elsewhere, leading to greater economic EFFICIENCY. For example, when a business manager installs a new machine that replaces manual laborers, the laborers who lose their jobs are now free to put their labor into another enterprise, resulting in more PRODUCTIVITY. In fact, in many cases, the number of jobs available will actually increase because the machinery is introduced.

Coming to think about it, there are some things that now come as second nature to this generation which have changed the way we conduct our daily lives. I am reminded of a friend who had to walk all the way to Chitungwiza because she had missed an appointment with her boyfriend, and yes her return ticket, at Harare Post Office which was then their usual rendezvous back in the day when Mobile phones were an unfathomable thought, a somewhat out of this world imagination like that of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who is quoted as having challenged Africans to leave Entebbe and go “a honeymooning” to space. According to one of our dailies this week, the President is reported by AFP to have said (that) “Africans must travel to the moon to investigate what developed nations are doing in outer space…The Americans have gone to the moon, and the Russians. The Chinese and Indians will go soon. Africans are the only ones who are stuck here…”. I think I know a bit about what those guys are doing in Space, its there somewhere on the internet or World Wide Web just download Google Earth 5.0 from http://earth.google.com and you also will soon find out a part of what these guys are doing. The only pity is that the good President was talking to lawyers I would have hoped he were talking to some Scientists or some Avionics Engineers or even some Professors’ of Robotics or something. I have nothing against lawyers but wasn’t that a deep subject for my learned brothers and sisters, or maybe they had to ponder on the legalities of such an “out of earth experience”?

Forgive me for tending to think aloud, but at least I’m being “PRODUCTIVE”. In the girl from Chitungwiza loses boy story I have alluded to above, can one imagine and quantify the time lost by both parties who as it later appeared where waiting patiently at opposite ends of the same building. Trivia, hey! Can you then take your imagination a little further and think of the loss had it been two important people, one learned brother who has traveled all the way from Masvingo by chicken bus, with the intention of meeting another important brother from Mutare and they get to the same place and can’t locate each other so that they can conclude a worthwhile transaction in person. Enter GSM, and the above scenario would become unimaginable from this end point as one student from an elite school would say “they just phone or text each other and they rock”. Now picture this, instead of traveling all the way from the two divergent locus points, again enter 3G and or video conferencing, the same two geeks “Video Call” each each say on Skype enabled by broadband internet access and the transaction happens pronto (there and then). Don’t worry about money changing hands, if we are wise enough soon we will have an e-wallet “happening”. I guess you are wise enough to calculate how much time would have been saved by opting to go ICT than go a-driving to meet in H-Town by the two strange bed fellows. Doesn’t one method enhance or lead to “more PRODUCTIVITY” and the older, oh sorry, other method lead to unnecessary tourism?

Productivity is one area of consideration which is difficult to quantify though its benefits and presence can be felt and seen. It is a fact and a reality that computers “speed up” various processes and hence lead to more work being done in a shorter work cycle (kufambisa nekurerutsa ndima). Examples abound, for good measure lets again use the power of imagination and visit a daily work routine, the routine being a filing exercise. With a manual system the process of filing is quite easy but talk of retrieving say 2 flat files from a whole room of flat files. Even if you are an organized Librarian that task may happen to be a mouthful, but convert that into two files on a server or computer and the ball game is heavily tilted in your favor. You just go onto the target computer and “search” for the two files and things happen in real time. “Search”, implying that on the target computer (the assumption here is that you are running on Windows) you go on the start menu, then go to search and a pop up appears with “For Files or Folders…” and on another pop up you then type your file name and hey everything else becomes history as various files or folders with the search name appear on screen. If what would take you several minutes or hours is accomplished in less time by aid of a computer, then isn’t that a direct translation into PRODUCTIVITY? My own unschooled definition of PRODUCTIVITY is more or less how much time is left to do other things after completing a given task optimally, that is with little effort and resources. They say in Shona “murimi haaonekwe nekukura kwebadza asi nendima yasakurwa” loosely translated “a farmer is not counted by the size of the hoe but the amount of land covered”. Just to put that in perspective it’s not a matter of completing tasks anymore but completing tasks without breaking a sweat and becoming unnecessarily muscular in the process. Why go back to the days of the manual steering when we can use a power steering in our cars and let the machines do the work?

When it comes to miraculous happenings, then broadband and yes the Internet is the worst culprit as a productivity tool. Many thanks to the guys at ZOL I am now on broadband and hey hey life is good. Before then I was on dial-up and it truly was killing me, I was truly lost and now I am found. Now with the super speed I have when accessing the Internet not even a second is lost in idle time when I do my research so that I don’t give you hearsay on this column. The funny reason why you don’t value the net like we would want to call it, is simply that you have not added anything of value on it hence your total disregard for its impact and importance. There is no reason why we should remain mentally deprived as a people because all the things that pertain to this age are readily available either for “free” or at a cost. I can’t preach enough about us being in the Information Age and the informed being masters over the uninformed. Those who neglected Industrialization or were too poor to move with the flow have found themselves at the end of the line. Isn’t that what will happen to those who continue to neglect the Information Age? When a family undertakes to build a house, the norm is that they neglect all forms of luxury including meat and go green (live on a diet of vegetables) what more we, who are to build a legacy and move from the last to somewhere, should we not put all our effort into real issues?

Just ponder on this extract: “ICTs enhance all forms of information exchange. Observation, learning and decision-making are facilitated, and business transactions are expanded and speeded up with ICTs. Opportunities can be identified and acted on more easily. Markets operate more efficiently and are more accessible. These lead to business-related efficiencies and faster turnover, increased PRODUCTIVITY, especially in the services sector, and profitability. As eBay has demonstrated, virtually anything can be bought or sold over the Internet using online marketplaces. Asia-Pacific countries have recognized this and so have many entrepreneurs. Several online markets – the so-called horizontal marketplaces – have been established to expand access to Asian goods and services. Indeed, for China, facilitating access to international markets for Chinese goods and services is one of the most important drivers of ICT policy. The expectation is clearly that e-commerce will become essential for international trade. Early adopters will win. Countries must transform themselves into information economies and knowledge-based societies. For many countries, including many Asian countries, this is the basis of their ICT policies.

It is not just large corporations that have realized the advantages of the Internet. In
Huoshan County, one of the poorer counties of Anhui province in China, an agricultural
information service connects several townships and villages. A network combining door to-door information collection and exchanges (sneaker nets), telephone, Internet via dial-up, small single operator agricultural information offices located in townships, and larger Web-enabled centres in municipalities have been established. In the municipalities, the county Web sites market local produce nationally and internationally and match needs for agricultural produce, especially cash crops such as medicinal plants, prized mushrooms, bamboo products, etc. This service facilitates contact and promotes exchanges between buyers and sellers, and helps extend and enhance the local agricultural market while helping small-scale farmers to bypass middlemen and obtain valuable information.” The two paragraphs above were taken from the UNDP ICT Policy Formulation and e-Strategy Development A Comprehensive Guidebook by Richard Labelle just to get you thinking in an ICT frame of mind.

My prayer for Africa is that GOD would transform us from being educated to being informed, from being clever to being wise, from being rich to being wealthy, from being first to best. How I long that our mental rape would stop!

“Wherefore seeing we also are encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” Hebrews 12 verse 1.