An article by the CEO of Prime Source
The Digital Kazakhstan programme is to be revised. That decision was taken at a meeting on digitalization held on 4 March 2020 with the President in attendance. The global viral crisis has shown which sectors of the economy need to modernize their “digital” strategies.
The list includes system-wide areas such as e-government and distance learning systems.
The information technology markets of Kazakhstan and of the world as a whole are going through another renaissance. The coronavirus pandemic has shown that if your company has no modern digital channels to the consumer (or at least to an aggregator of goods and services), then your business does not exist. Kazakhstan’s IT industry is changing under the impact of the coronavirus and, in the view of market participants, there are several key conclusions to be drawn from this process.
First. Major business continuity risks have emerged for IT companies. The closure of the physical offices of IT companies’ clients made it impossible to provide services and to perform contracted work. Most new projects and procurements were put on hold. In time it proved possible to organize the work of IT company employees on projects at the most digitalized enterprises, but total revenue fell by between 25 and 75%. Without the measures taken by the state to temporarily reduce the tax burden on the industry, a large number of IT specialists would have been left without work or income. IT budgets may be cut further, yet most business owners have become convinced of the need to invest in digital.
Second. The more of an enterprise’s processes are digital, the less the quarantine affects them. Customers stopped coming to your physical offices, but came back through digital channels. Banks, for instance, which have many digital processes, carried on working remotely. Enterprises that had not been robotized found their operations frozen. The coronavirus crisis has shown that the digitalization of enterprises is mandatory.
Third. Digital services need to be popularized among the country’s population. The growing use of technology at home and at work will help citizens learn faster how to use remote e-government services, online stores, delivery and so on. This in turn will increase the overall penetration of technology and become a stimulus for labor productivity growth.
Fourth. The Digital Kazakhstan programme needs to be adjusted, because challenges unknown until recently have emerged from the coronavirus. At the same time, everything is in place in Kazakhstan for the further development of the digital economy: a mature market, steadily growing demand, investment, technology and — most importantly — the universal will to transform that has recently appeared.
Fifth. The skeptics of digitalization have become convinced that technology is extremely useful and helps to raise labor productivity substantially. Digitalization is essential to secure the competitiveness of the country as a whole and of individual enterprises in particular. IT is capable of becoming a driver industry for the development of Kazakhstan’s non-resource economy. Insufficient attention to digitalization could create threats to the country’s national security.
Source:https://kursiv.kz/news/obschestvo/2020-05/kak-cifrovizaciya-stala-voprosom-nacionalnoy-bezopasnosti