Tag: Accenture Africa

Two years ago, we warned that organisations failing to embrace data, artificial intelligence (AI), and technology would risk being left behind by their competitors. A year later this prediction came true as organisations ranked technology as the most disruptive force in organisations in 2023 and rocketed to the top of the corporate agenda.

For many business leaders, the heat is on. They face inflation, supply chain disruption, labour shortages, and pricing pressures. Protecting margins while meeting customer needs and navigating economic uncertainty is crucial. However, many lack transparency and granularity in actual cost structures.

The world is in a permanent state of change amid technology, economy, consumer and climate change demands. Although there have been remarkable leaps in automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), company leaders will continue to need highly skilled talent to meet their business needs.

Business leaders are not always willing or able to take on the challenge of transforming the existing operating model. They face resistance due to turf wars, internal bureaucracy, legacy working methods, technology debt and corporate politics. In fact, over 31% of business leaders consider resistance to change within their organisation a pivotal barrier to redesigning the operating model.

What sound better encapsulates the early 2000s than a dial-up internet tone? That shrill shriek of robotic beeps and high-pitched ringing signalled your entry into the World Wide Web – at that stage, a few basic HTML-coded pages of text and perhaps an image that took forever to load.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in the global economy and offer an untapped opportunity for Communications Service Providers (CSPs). As they emerge from the pandemic, SMEs have been spending more across a range of technologies, with spending on IT and digital services set to increase by 7.6% CAGR to reach $1.7 trillion by 2026.

Over the past few years, the world has seen a massive wave of digital advancement – especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ways in which we engage with others and our work have been permanently altered. Digital innovation has become a real necessity.

As self-driving industrial vehicles mature and the Internet of Things (IoT) as well as wireless connectivity become more widespread, the mining industry in South Africa has shown a growing interest in automating haul trucks and other mobile equipment.

For banks, disruption has become business as usual. Besides the ever-changing customer expectations, banks are under pressure to defend their market share against increased competition and the digitisation of the financial services landscape by neo-banks and FinTechs.

To expediently adapt a famous observation, we do not only live interesting times but challenging ones as well and the only way we are going to navigate through our myriad problems is for a new type of leadership philosophy to emerge. It means CEO’s need to radically rethink their entire purpose and the way in which they plan operate and execute and to become more tuned into the zeitgeist. It is time to leave the ivory tower and take a reality check.