In Africa

Have you ever placed a call to a personal mobile phone in SSA? it may not be a very pleasant experience – especially if the individual on the receiving end doesn’t immediately recognize your number or decipher your identity within the first 10 seconds; you are either going to have the phone hung up on you, or be subjected to some pretty strong interrogatory verbiage:
Who are you?
Who is this?
What do you want?
You are calling from where?
For who?
The tirade is all delivered in the most biting staccato – feels like getting a hug from a porcupine.

The 21^st century miracle of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) maybe the teledensity up-tick; Mobile phones are finding their way very fast into the hands of sub-Saharan Africans, but phone etiquette is not quite there yet.

And then there’s superstition; rumor has it that some people can broadcast a voodoo hex out over a mobile phone call – the spell could turn an innocent call receiver into a goat or dog or whatever, who would then go vomit money to whoever put out the voodoo spell. So the second rule of the African phone etiquette is; if you don’t recognize the number of the incoming call, you don’t pick up!

Africa vs. West

Another interesting technology-fostered socio-cultural disconnect – this I actually experienced first-hand when I first moved to the United States from Africa.

In Africa, we usually go charging down to the utility companies – electricity, telephone, water –whenever bills came due or in the event of frequent billing disputes or termination of service. You would present your billing records and argue your case vigorously with customer service attendants until your situation was rectified “in their books.”  Then you got turned over to the technicians responsible for restoring your service – for these guys, you’d typically have to “show appreciation” upfront (a bribe), in order for your service to actually be restored. That sums up the average 3^rd world/SSA utility company customer service experience.

Fast-forward to America – electricity, phone, cable, whatever bill arrives in the mail; return envelope included, due date, return address, acceptable modes of payment, etc., all clearly indicated. If you choose to pass up on mailing your check payment back in the envelope, you could pay by phone; you'd pick up the phone and call the billing service; and for a credit card payment -- give them your credit card number, or for check payment – give your bank account number and check number. Or the more preferred option -- setting up an online bill payment system which you could either manually enter all your bills due or set up to automatically deduct bills from your bank account every billing cycle.  And in the events of service or billing disputes – you’d call the utility customer service number and sort your problems out. All transactions conducted from the cozy comfort of your living room couch!

So looking at both customer service scenarios you'd say; life must be real tough for the tech-challenged Africans. Damn right! But the interesting thing I observe with recent émigrés and bill payments; when they want to pay bills or make service requests or disputations; they don’t even look at the telephone or the computer – they want to go to the utility company’s office location where they can conduct the transaction face to face with a human being, just like they would in Africa. And for those of us in Diaspora who’ve forgotten so quickly or those who didn’t undergo this customer service “paradigm shift” as abruptly as some of others, this perfunctory gravitation to a face-to-face customer service setting may seem rather timid or outright stupid. But in actuality, it is usually borne out of a primitive apprehension over new information and communication technologies (ICTs) as bona-fide deal making apparatus – a stubborn resistance to severing the umbilical cord of pen and ink recorded receipts for transactions sealed with reassuring handshakes and a pat on the back.   Heck – no deals however big or small are really ever sealed over the phone in Africa  -- from a mundane 20 cent purchase of a cup of peanuts from a roadside vendor to a much more thespian $10,000 line of credit acquirement from your bank – they are all sealed with same look in the eyes, a light pat on the hand for the peanut seller and a hefty fist pumping or bear hug for the bank loan officer.

Business

Personnel/Human resource management in America has become less and less the traditional face-to-face, handholding and cheerleading activities, and has gradually been consigned to the somewhat uncongenial web-based employee self-service portals, where employees can go read or listen to pre-recorded instructions and then manage their health plans, and other benefits all by themselves. No doubt, American companies have saved tons of money by cutting back on human resource counseling staff and switching to online portals and telephony based systems, but they still keep just enough HR staff around to help with some employees who can’t get weaned too fast from the much nicer and reassuring HR counselor who explains everything step by step, and who you could also stop at anytime to ask questions.

This CNN article presents some pathological tech-transitioning scenarios that had very adverse impacts on some companies, and straight up kayoed a few others.

Transitioning manual business processes to tech-driven environment such as adopting an Enterprise resource-planning (ERP) platform can get pretty complex for different businesses depending on the size and intricacy of their business processes. This article however brings out the often-downplayed factor of user community acceptance a.k.a. employee buy-in. They say you can take a horse to the stream but you cannot force it to drink – likewise, you can impose some new whiz-bang, ICT-driven business platform, but if it would be totally useless if the user community fails to evolve a usage culture around it.

Cut a long story short, there is a very real human element to deploying ICTs into society for economic progress and betterment of human existence in Africa. Is it possible then that fledgling ICT initiatives such as Ayo Africa-Bazaar e-commerce portal, which is closely patterned after the western phenom; Ebay, may face its biggest challenges along the unexpected lines of gaining the African user community acceptance and trust? And could this be a major redefinition of the African ICT4D (ICT for development) conundrum – in the sense that; the major problem is not necessarily how quickly we can land new technologies and physical connectivity in Africa, but how quickly we can get the African culture to “organically” evolve around these new ICTs?