To better understand the digital transformation process of the African continent, we talked to the Commercial and Marketing Director of BCX, Luís Enoque, graduated in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Coimbra, with specialization in Telecommunications, having started his career at ReferTelecom in Portugal, as Transmission Engineer.
He was Strategic Account Manager and Cisco Business Unit Manager at I-TEC, then moved to INTELLICA as Senior Consultant and then assumed the role of Systems and Information and Communication Technology Consulting Manager, before joining BCX.
In an interview, Enoch started by considering that for BCX it is a vision to be the number one strategic partner for the digitalization of the African continent, although this very process involves, in his understanding, time, money and structural changes.
In this line of thought, the BCX Commercial and Marketing Director refutes the idea that the introduction of computerization came to take away jobs. The interviewee argues that this is a way to present to people in various areas of activity, a new way of working and getting results in an effective way.
“Digitization is like replacing the wheel of a car while it is running, so BCX prioritizes that the operational side of things continue to work while the changes are implemented,” he said, adding that “the first challenge of digitization is the people because we feel that at some point they have resistance to change the way they worked before to an easier way that allows more control.
ELECTRONIC BILLING SYSTEM
As an example, BCX developed, among several applications, an electronic ticketing system for the company Caminhos de Ferro de Moçambique, which allows its managers to control in real time aspects related to the amount of tickets sold, the flow of passengers between stations and, above all, to control the revenue collected, among others.
“At the time of the pandemic this system helped a lot in controlling the capacity of the trains, taking into account that the government had stipulated a certain percentage of travelers and when the process is manual it is difficult to understand.
Therefore, the reviewers had defined a maximum number of tickets they could sell and, after it ran out, the machine would block”, explained Luís Enoque reaffirming that the biggest objective, besides the drastic reduction of paper, is the digitalization to obtain data in record time for its analysis and a timely decision making.
CHALLENGES OF DIGITALIZATION AND CYBERSECURITY IN TIMES OF COVID-19
“In South Africa we have the two largest commercial data centers that exist in Africa. There are still challenges because some companies (particularly in finance) cannot have their information in a cloud outside the country, but those that can benefit greatly from our data centers, through the BCX One Cloud service,” he said.
With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced most institutions to adopt remote work, the protection of information has become more vulnerable, according to Luís Enoque, because for him it is the corporate environment that offers better cybersecurity.
“From the moment people start working remotely, it is assumed that they leave the corporate environment, making access to information vulnerable, however the corporate environment offers more security,” he warned.
For BCX the pandemic period was an opportunity to bring several technological solutions to the market, from the introduction of electronic signatures, introduction of cameras with the ability to measure the temperature of groups of people remotely, and appointment system, among others.
