Yesterday, Oracle announced its Impact Technology Summit, hosted in Nairobi and geared towards driving awareness of emerging technologies and their impact on business.
Impact Kenya brought together domain experts and business leaders to discuss the influence emerging technologies has on business innovation. The summit explored how the right technologies, when used in combination, can make innovation something businesses do every single day.
“Emerging technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain are changing the way companies do business at every level, across every function, in ways we are only starting to imagine,” said Corine Mbiaketcha Nana, Managing Director Kenya Hub covering East, Central and West Africa at Oracle.
“The cloud is the engine that enables businesses to innovate faster, improve customer engagement, drive business-process efficiency, and accelerate digital transformation. It is the enabler of emerging technologies such as AI, Machine Learning and Blockchain,” she added.
An example of the impact of cloud-enablement is the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA). To support its strategic drive to enhance service delivery to taxpayers, KRA deployed Oracle Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that provides it with a single platform to better understand customer needs and respond to their demands more quickly and efficiently.
A recent example of blockchain’s impact is Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) that piloted Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service to provide it with a trusted platform for the full automation of Customs Excise Trade business processes and procedures. This technology allows NCS to document and track products that are manufactured locally, right from the source of licensing and permits for manufacturing, to distribution and point of sale. This proof of concept shows that the entire business environment of NCS can be migrated to blockchain to automate as many customs processes as possible, creating transparency and predictability.
“It’s time to stop thinking about emerging technologies as scary or disruptive challenges business needs to overcome. Business leaders must move beyond the vision they have for technology in their organization and start to explore the practical steps they can take to make innovation something they do every day. Most businesses, if not all, should be excited about these new technologies,” Mbiaketcha Nana said.
