Public-private sector collaboration is key to addressing ICT skills shortage [Sponsored]

Setjhaba Molloyi, Managing Director for Accenture South Africa Delivery Centre, says there is no doubt that we are in the midst of a major technology evolution and organisations across all sectors are going through a significant transformation. To address the skills shortage issue and make a great impact in the economy as well as create more jobs, public-private sector collaboration is key, says Setjhaba Molloyi.

“That is why Accenture works very closely with partners across all sectors (including SAP, SETA and various NGOs) to increase the pool of ICT professionals who have the requisite skills,” notes Molloyi.

Accenture is working with its partners in the following way:

• Through the collaboration with SETA, Accenture has trained over 480 interns and majority of them have been placed successfully in the job market.
• Accenture also has its Skills to Succeed programme, which is a Corporate Citizenship initiative aimed at empowering unemployed youth with ICT skills and placing them in digital jobs. To date, 1,200 candidates have been trained and placed in digital jobs.
• Accenture and SAP share a unified mission to promote economic growth and sustainable job creation. For this reason, we have partnered with SAP on a ‘SAP on Skills for Africa’ Programme by identifying graduates and training them on new IT such as SAP HANA.

Over and above this, Accenture is hosting an Innovation conference which will play a significant role in bringing global trend setters and our key business clients together.

“Through this, our clients will gain radical insights which will enable them to devise disruptive strategies to take them beyond now into a future ignited by innovation,” says Molloyi.

Molloyi also notes that with the speed at which technology is moving, CIOs need to change how they deliver IT and move from legacy systems to what Accenture calls the New IT. This embraces the collaboration of these three factors; the what, the how, and the who:

• The what is the architecture.
• The how, is the processes by which you deliver.
• And, finally, it’s the who, and how you prepare to enable the New IT.

“As companies move to this New IT, they will be able to deliver new customer experiences at much greater speed with higher quality products and services,” says Molloyi.

To support the New IT, Accenture has a Delivery Centre in South Africa which specialises in designing, developing and maintaining IT systems for our clients.

The Centre is an integral part of Accenture’s Global Delivery Network which includes over 50 Delivery Centre facilities.

For our 2017 financial year, the Delivery Centre will focus on remaining relevant to Accenture’s existing and new clients through New IT offerings.

“As we transform to the New IT we aspire to take our clients on this journey, where we will help them to rotate to New IT and assist them to be high-performing organisation,” says Molloyi.

For more information, take a look at Accenture’s website, and follow the company on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.