That we are here to talk about information technology is correct. That we are fascinated by hot new gadgets it true. That we are excited by the economic growth that we experience is good. However, we cannot forget that these things are only the means that we seek to the development of our society.

In fact, we will be penalised not by the courts of law but by the market if we forget to have at the back of our minds real development even as we try to grow the services economy in Ghana and other places. But how can we develop products that will be successful if we do not begin on this premise?

It is for this reason that I have chosen to first outline some of our unique and painful challenges that stunt our development and then go on to cite some promising web enabled services that are poised to address them.

The Skill and Productivity Gap

So I begin with an often underplayed challenge: our human resource base and its development. More often than not what we and others have considered to make us a rich continent has been the treasure trove of mineral wealth and raw materials that we have. But this cannot be correct. If we take the cocoa industry for example, it is worth over $75 billion Dollars annually, and only $4 billion Dollars is this sum is obtained by West African countries involved in only the cultivation of 70 percent the raw material: the cocoa tree. Africa has nearly 465 million people below the age of 15 and they are the real treasure. They are the Cheetah generation as described by George Ayiteey, a Ghanaian economist.

To the point, the products of institutions of higher learning have not met the expectation of industry because education at this level has not been goal oriented and has been largely disconnected from students’  interests, values and abilities, as well as the career market. Essentially, there has not been the meta-education needed. The meta-education as I choose to call it is the avenue that can be used to guide the education given at various levels and connect it to industry, interests and abilities. It is only when we put in place the career planning facilities, well-designed internships and avenues for mentoring, that we will have the quality higher education that we seek. This will drive the services economy and IT enabled services that we seek to build.

It would not be far fetched to say that this is the very reason that we have workers who cannot wait for the clock to strike five; people who are not fulfilled by the work they do. How can we possibly expect more from such a workforce? I am talking about PRODUCTIVITY. It is not going to be a question of whether we pay people better before they can produce or whether productivity improves before we can have higher incomes. The issue is how we are going to align the workforce to their interests and other factors and then we can have higher productivity and higher incomes.

I am not the first to see this problem, clearly. Indeed the Professor Jophus Anamuah Report that is the foundation of the new educational reforms determined that career planning should be one of the five pillars of the educational reform programme. The difficulty here is that the reforms implementation strategy on this particular subject is flawed in more ways than one. The first lies in the cost of deploying career guidance experts to all high schools and institutions of higher learning. Even if the government could foot that bill, we do not have at our disposal that many career guidance experts.

How can we use technology to save the situation? At my company, we are building a web application that will enable easier access to career planning and connect people wherever they may be located to our career guidance experts. Students will be able to use this service on  Pay-As-You-Go terms and the system makes delivery of career planning more efficient since it is partly automated whilst being engaging and interactive. This arrangement allows more information to be pooled as a resource for students rather than putting the emphasis on the career counsellor. Our emphasis is on enabling the student to chart a career course. The iGuide will also arrange internships and create technology - based mentoring opportunities.

This leads me to the second challenge we will be addressing this afternoon:

The artificial limit of the informal economy

Businesses in the informal economy are artificially restricted as it has difficulty in accessing credit and in forming partnerships with large formal businesses that offer them real growth opportunities. This situation exists for the reason that the business people are not equipped with the skills necessary to satisfy the regulatory administrations and also because the tax burden is heavy on the few businesses that fall into the tax net. Since no awards goes for outlining the problems which we all are very much aware of, I'll jump straight into how we can use technology to deal with this challenge.

Using web based applications, we can build to some degree the knowledge that is needed to satisfy regulators so that businessmen and women can meet their obligations without the operational knowledge of things like income tax computation and so on. This is exactly what the OpeClay Paychex does. It makes it simple for anyone to enter payroll data into a web APP that is as simple as Yahoo! Mail and then generates the IRS and Social Security reports that are delivered to the agencies. It is important here that as we build such tools that enable more and more businesses to formalise, we lay the emphasis on simplicity and ease of use.

Our failure to build IT Infrastructure in most organisations, especially business enabling software

Taking a walk into most organisations; schools, businesses, hospitals and so on, one will come across computers. However it is only when you begin to interact with the organisation that you realise the level of ineptitude in terms of Information Technology Infrastructure. The business is simply not enabled to function effectively using the computing resource available. This is obvious isn't it? To use a personal experience, my organisation required occupational statistical data from the Ghana Statistical Service. We had to submit a document that specified the data requirements form, which we did. After several calls to the service without a meaningful response, I walked into the agency building only to be told that the document could not be found. This embarrassing scenario could have been prevented with a document tracking system or a Customer Relationship Management tool. Certainly a lot more can be done within businesses with regards to I.T infrastructure.

I cannot say for sure what has lead to this situation, but it must be a mix of issues including the way in which computers have been sold and serviced, the pricing schemes of software and the low level of appreciation of I.T by businesses people.

What I.T. Infrastructure providers can do to tackle this challenge is to recognise that most organisations do not have access to the capital that is required to purchase the much needed infrastructure. We need to get innovative in pricing software and other components. This is one of the innovations that have made mobile telephony a success and pricing innovation can do it for I.T infrastructure too.

It must be recognised again that the majority of organisations in our environment do not have the internal IT support department to run their IT Infrastructure effectively. By keeping this fact in mind when developing solutions, we can provide 'worry-free' services, particularly when we design web based services which can be managed from the back-end by real professionals.

Where does Open Source development fit into all this?

Open Source software provides us with the common infrastructural base, which includes the web servers, operating systems, common business tools and software development tools through which we can parley to deliver the specific types of tools needed in our environment. It changes the game in such a way that it does not pit price against quality but shows that with a different approach, price and quality are not contradictory values.  It changes the game also because it allows us to become producers and not remain the consumer society we have been throughout much of our history.