The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions.

The question is: which item(s) on the SSA ICT agenda should we pursue first? What should we do now? What should we leave for tomorrow? What should we not do at all?

At the very basic, everybody wants to take all the guesswork [and superstition] out of decision making! A businessman wants to narrow the odds of a "buy-now" (or later) decision, Health departments want to have real time update on disease outbreak and spread, a surgical equipment entrepreneur wants to know how many doctors, hospitals or labs are in a target market area, graduating college students want to examine different aspects of career fields and figure out which is a best fit/has greater reward potential, Governments yearn to map resources to problems more equitably, etc.

ICT forms a bundle of terrific tools and devices that can take a lot of stress out of day to day decision-making, at home or work, in government or other administrative processes. On a grander scale, ICT promises to kick start/leapfrog entire SSA economies into higher prosperity realms! The SSA ICT jingle is 99.9% Jeff Burroughs on Science and social development; "Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than [superstition] did in eighteen hundred years." The supreme maxim of the current information age says information is power, but nobody seems to spend enough time explaining the synthesis of power from information/knowledge in SSA. I tried to say that much in this worldbank PSD online discussion.

One problem at a time, I agree. Currently, ICT4D in SSA is most evident in the telecom sectors -– with priorities of making communication cheaper and easily accessible. Another turf is Enterprise IT applications/Corporate ICT uptake in SSA -- gaining ground in SSA, albeit at a slower pace. But the "Grand unification" of all the different SSA ICT aspirations across different economic sectors; Academics, Business, Government, Health/Humanitarian, etc., hinges on evolving quality Decision support processes or systems to address all the "what", "when" and "how much" questions.

Just like African Witch doctors would cast beads for divination, ICT divination beads are (digital) data. And before we start tripping all over industry buzz words and morphology of digital data; data structures, data warehousing, data querying, Knowledge management, etc., the ICT Decision support system concept simply involves collecting/capturing raw data (ordinarily meaningless pieces of information), aggregating the data via certain algorithmic process to extract useful/usable information or knowledge, gaining some wisdom from the acquired knowledge which can then be applied towards resolving a problem.

Take for instance, in a portion of this interview with the daughter of the Nigerian President, who happens to be gunning for a senate seat – she takes a swipe at SSA resource planning with the Electricity generating problem; Electricity generating plants were built in the 1960s for a certain population size, but population at 25% per Annum Avg. growth rate, has since doubled while the resources (power plants) have received zero augmentation in same period. Interesting juxtaposition of fixed (dwindling) resource capacity and usage growth statistics; This kind of information is often neither presented to, nor processed in this manner by SSA public.

If data is collected, sanitized and stored, with the processed knowledge nuggets made available to the public in a reliable and usable manner (real time where necessary); SSA societies can then understand the nature of their problems better, and make more accurate need assessments, plot solutions to problems better, and generally embrace the culture of data-logical decision making. For me, this is the crux of the ICT4D information liberalization.

It still would not be a perfect world in data-driven SSA – Western societies, with a plethora of advanced Decision Support Systems, are not perfect yet (Read how the Cisco "crystal ball" failed to predict the 2001 recession), but then again, SSA stands to learn from early adopter mistakes already made in the west.