Ghana needs cloud, cognitive technology urgently

Beyond the national mission to diversify the productive base of the economy, we also require innovative thinking, cross industry collaboration and advanced technology solutions. Now more than ever before, countries, companies and citizens in the African environment need to wake up to the ‘transformative reality’ of advanced technologies such as cloud computing, data analytics, mobile and cognitive sciences (or artificial intelligence).

Retaining our position as a leading, fast growing economy in the West Africa sub-region will very much depend on how well we adopt these technologies for the benefit of our society. Technology now exists to help us tackle our mobility, mass illiteracy and education, skills development, food security, waste management, power generation and waste management headaches. 

Thanks to these technologies, we can process a lot more information faster than ever before, and the concept of distance has practically disappeared.

The global village is visible online and virtually within reach through our mobile devices. Thanks to the increasing use of mobile technology by Ghanaians, our contributions to the emerging global order continues to grow, as Ghanaian brands now begin to attract more offshore patronage.

Technology analysts say as much as 80 per cent of all the data in the world has been created in past three years, and that there will be a three-fold increase in data-transmitting transistors per human by 2017. This constantly expanding pool of data is fueling economic growth and social disequilibrium in equal measure.

According to analysts, the disruptive influence of cognitive computing, cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security will continue to grow across the world, with price-sensitive Africa-based companies becoming huge adopters of these new technologies.

African societies ,therefore, need to pro-actively build technology infrastructure to contain and ‘manage’ their data assets. By acting pro-actively, we would be fomenting responsible behaviour and positioning our companies and governments to reap the benefits of insight-driven decision making which ultimately lead to improved economies and quality of lives. The use of data analytics and cognitive computing tools in governance and business also means a better informed citizenry and work force

Uses of technology

Use of these available technologies can actually help resolve some of our current problems. Examples abound of how advanced computing technology is helping the world’s mature economies reorganise their healthcare management, law enforcement, transportation management, aviation services, sports and media industries, just to list a few examples.

In Ghana, there is plenty of work ahead and plenty of catching up to do. One community which already understands the importance of technology is the banking and finance sector. As financial intermediaries in the economic and social value chain, our banks play a critical role in development. Despite their varied investments in their operations, most Ghanaian banks have server rooms and not real data centres. If we have a plethora of server rooms and there are no disaster recovery plans or procedures in place, then we are basically not being proactive.

This sort of timely investment in technology solutions is key to our economic and financial inclusion goals. Next door, in Nigeria, 80 per cent of their banks now run on IBM's enterprise server architecture. IBM has also announced more than 20 banking deals throughout Africa over the last six years, with Kenyan, Ghanaian, Nigerian and Congolese banks turning to IBM for world-class IT solutions.

Globally, IBM supports the world’s top banks. Whilst 70 per cent of the world’s data is managed on IBM systems, 95 of the top 100 banks worldwide use IBM business or technology services to run their business. These banks depend on IBM to support their operations.

Ghana is benefiting from this global track record. Beyond building data centres that help banks better manage their data assets and transactions processing, we have also begun to foment be-spoke technology supports solutions and services around the most critical technology-support requirements of banks. So now, we refer to this as managing around CAMSS, which is our unique acronym for our integrated Cloud, Analytics & Big Data,

Mobile, Security and Social computing solutions. This IBM CAMSS toolkit is an essential technology suite and extremely relevant for banks and financial institutions operating in fast growing, middle-income economies like ours.

Changing patterns

The era of going to queue in a banking hall is coming to an end. We are now in the age of mobile commerce and multi-channel banking.

For instance, when shoppers pay for groceries at a supermarket, using their ATM cards on the point-of-sale (POS) terminals, they are essentially interacting with the banking system. So, transactions processing now happens on the fly, as customers begin to demand for more speed, accuracy and authenticity in their banking and non-bank transactions. So the importance of data integrity, safety and security intelligence in the banking value chain cannot be overemphasized. Ongoing investments in technology assets, bank records and customer data need to be protected.

These are some of the real enterprise-level issues companies and consumers are grappling with. IBM’s way of responding to these ‘business information management’ challenges in commerce and industry is to keep making organic investments in cloud, analytics and mobile technologies, in addition to strategic alliances and acquisitions in these areas. Analytics will also be key to the future growth of the Ghanaian business environment.

Having data and not being able to properly use it to help you operate more efficiently will be dangerous because analytics will soon become the soul of every business. Collating and consistently analysing the traffic to a firm’s website, for instance, will be an instructive exercise.

Analysing this sort of data for trends and insights on customer behaviour and preferences will always be useful information for any company keen on retaining and growing its market share. Finally, how do we benefit from cognitive computing and artificial intelligence – the ability to make computing systems process business information with human-like cognition.

This new technology will begin to define and drive the management of structured and unstructured data. This is the next era of computing. IBM inventors have developed new technologies that can help machines learn, reason, and efficiently process diverse data types while interacting with people in natural and familiar ways. So, machines are beginning to decipher our emotions. For most of the history of computing, humans have had to play by the machines’ rules —mostly typing or pushing buttons to make ourselves understood. In the cognitive era, machines will increasingly listen and talk to us.

A group of scientists from IBM Research’s China lab have recently patented a system that helps machines interpret emotion-laden words so they can converse with us in more natural ways. (Patent US9117446) IBM has consistently supported Ghana’s technology community.

This month in Accra, we will be enabling scores of talented Ghanaian software architects and developers with advanced analytics, cloud and big data knowledge and techniques during a week-long session of our Africa Technical Academy (ATA). This is part of IBM’s $60 million investment over the next three years to develop the next generation of technical talent in Africa.

As two-thirds of IBM research’s work is now devoted to data, analytics and cognitive computing, the company is certainly poised to partner the Ghanaian government in its development agenda for the nation. So, once again, I ask: what does Ghana’s economy need to remain on the path of growth?