Country Digitization-Inside The Playbook

For tech companies, country digitization projects mean millions or even billions of dollars in business, but they are high-risk and complex endeavors

- Ed Nair

While digital transformation has become the holy grail for enterprises, countries are not far behind. It is not about selling your way through and hooking up technology all around. Guy Died rich, VP and Global Innovation Officer, Cisco knows better. Died rich is a member of Cisco’s Office of the Chairman and CEO, contributing to Cisco’s Country Digitization Acceleration. He is currently working with government and industry leaders in countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas to digitize the public and private sectors in order to increase GDP, create millions of next-generation jobs, and develop sustainable innovation ecosystems.

Cisco has set up country digitization accelerators (CDA) in 18 countries and two more would be added shortly. These countries range from small ones like Portugal and Kazakhstan to large ones like India and China to developed ones like UK, Italy, and Germany. These countries represent nearly a third of the world’s population. The ideal candidates for CDA are countries that are committed to digitalization with a published digital agenda that is supported by requisite budget outlays. Factors such as economic growth potential and large population help. The idea is to be able to correlate the impact of digitization with economic performance indicators such GDP growth and jobs growth.

CDA – CHARTING THE ROUTE, PLANNING THE STEPS 

When asked as to how does Cisco go through huge country digitization projects when so many stakeholders are involved and how do they achieve pace, Died rich referred to what he wrote on his blog: “How does country digitization work? Considering the complexities of developing a plan to digitize an entire country, the process from evaluation to having an executable plan happens at almost warp speed at Cisco – between 90 to 120 days.”