Mereja Forum

[DefendTheTruth]

PM Dr. Abiy Ahmed and others have been commenting about the role of electrifying the country to increase the productivity of the country and its contribution to the development of the country, by making more energy available for the work-force in the country.

But there is a difference between electrifying the whole of the country and achieving the intended rise of productivity, technically speaking.

These are two steps in reaching the intended objective of increasing productivity. One will be built on the other, as you may guess from the following description.

You can implement electrification of the nation from end-to-end, you can enable the work-force of the country to use the electric power to increase their respective productivity (increasing power) but that is not yet in a position to realize the optimization of the business process, for example it can improve the production process of businesses and other facilities, but not yet in a position to automate the business process itself. Just because you might have been able to increase your production doesn't mean that you have also realise the intended productivity in over all terms.

For the ultimate rise of productivity you need to optimize the business process, which covers the whole range of steps before and after the actual step of production itself. This optimization is dubbed automation of the business process, in technical terms.

The automation needs an extra enabler and that is not yet possible with just electrification. It needs the extra step of information processing automatically (or, if you like, electronically), which step the Ethiopian Customs Authority introduced today, after over 100 years of its existence. I think the Customs Authority used to have electric supply all along but it was found out that it was not yet in a position to optimize its productivity (output) with that alone, as the video below alleges itself.

This step needs now to be replicated into the many other economic institutions and sectors of the country and make business process automation the reality.

By just automating a single entity or a sector in the whole of the chain of economic actors you can't realise the intended automation and with that not yet the full potential of rise of productivity.

Someone may still remember my post about "The 4 Eras" at viewtopic.php?f=17&t=182086&p=941107&hi ... as#p941107

and that must be clearer by now for all.

[DefendTheTruth]

Ethiopia seems to have jump started already from the Intelligence Era (AI) of the information processing phases without first having adequately developed the preceeding phases of Business Process Automation and Digital Transformation.

This is, like I have already tried to present under another thread "The 4 Eras", is the last step in the optimization and automation endeavors of information processing.

I would be a bit sceptic if Ethiopia could realise the full potential of the technology by directly starting from the Intelligence stage of the development stages.

Client-Server Era enabled businesses and organizations to automate their business processes.

Then came in digital transformation which primarily enabled the two to make a sound decision by supporting the decision making process (providing the needed information at the right time in the right format, at the right place, among others).

A well developed Client-Server based automated business process enabled the introduction and efficient utilization of digital transformation.

The problem we have in Ethiopia is that we don't have yet the needed infrastructure to have a matured digital transformation and this in turn will hamper the effort of successful realisation of the intelligence era or Artificial Intelligence.


There was also a report about Ethiopia trying to leap start directly from the Digital Transformation itself, I am not sure how successful that plan was/is.

Ethiopia planning to leapfrog directly into the Era of Digital Transformation; will it succeed?