The document outlines the key challenges of ICT in Ethiopia, including operational failures, misalignment with business priorities, value delivery issues, security threats, regulatory compliance gaps, complexity management, and cost optimization. It also suggests establishing project governance and provides insights from the author's experience in the field. Overall, it emphasizes the need for better communication, planning, and strategic alignment to improve ICT effectiveness in the country.

1. Gizaw Tulu (ITIL, PRINCE2, PMP, COBIT5, EA,
Cloud )
Interest in: IT Service Management (ITSM)
Key Challenges of ICT in Ethiopia
[High level]
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Key Challenges of ICT in Ethiopia
1. Keep IT running
2. Aligning IT with business
3. Delivering value
4. Security
5. Regulatory compliance
6. Mastering complexity
7. Optimizing costs
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1. Keep IT running
 IT operational failures
 Errors when introducing changes
 Insufficient testing [Decent coding but No/limited independent testing company]
 Poor planning of infrastructure within the organization
 Insufficient resilience of backup and backup testing
 Single provider of Network/Internet connectivity and Connection instability
 Poor user enablement
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2. Aligning IT with business
 Poor and slack alignment with business priorities
 Poorly defined business requirements
 Communication gaps between business and IT
 Insufficient knowledge abut potential IT solutions
 Inability to follow/incorporate international best practices
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3. Delivering value
 Limited/Lack of committed business sponsors during project management
 Poor program and project management
 Inadequate monitoring of benefit realization
 Lack of defined business cases for IT related initiatives
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4. Security
 Poorly defined security policies and its enforcement
 Insufficient monitoring of potential security related events
 Limited awareness among users about security risks
 Limited awareness among management of the needed to protect information
 Limited IT supervision and security testing
 Limited IT Audit
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5. Regulatory compliance
 Law and legal gaps
 Limited regulatory directives and gap
 Contractual requirement and dependency on SLA
 Responsibilities of outsourced service providers and business partners
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6. Mastering complexity
 Availability of specialized skill needed to support wide range of technology
 Alignment of Capacity building, training providers and sponsors with outcome
 Divers technical infrastructures and lack of architectural standards
 Inability to innovate and adapt to rapid changes and new developments in
technology and business requirements
 Inability to focus on important service providers and manage key relationships
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7. Optimizing costs
 Lack of financial management skill and cost of ownership
 Significant financial losses because of failed IT projects
 Excessive resources (costs/time) due to poor management of IT
 Uncontrolled IT spending by business units
 Ineffective procurement acquisition and contraction procedures
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Suggestions:cascadegoal
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BeforeinitiatinganITProject,Isuggesttofollowthe
followinggoalcascadingsteps.

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Suggestions: Establish Project Governance
 There are four level:
1. Corporate or programme management - outside the project – responsible to
commission the project - define tolerance.
2. Directing – project board – approve plan, resources - authorize Change/deviation -
approve each stages - communicate with stakeholders - Project assurance
3. Managing – Project manager – day to day management of Project - prime
responsible for time, cost, quality, scope, risk and benefit – Project Support
4. Delivering – Team manager - team members are responsible for delivering the
project’s products to an appropriate quality within a specified timescale and cost.
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Suggestions
 More white paper in all seven challenges
 IT Audit organizations and Academes
 IT Regulatory framework
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Note from compiler
 This document is not a research paper, everything written are a general
perspective not particularly related with any organization reside in Ethiopia.
 Written from a decade of experience.
 Government and private sectors spends billions to enable the business with IT
 I witness an organization who are actively understand most of the challenges
listed in this document and work proactively in an amazing pace.
 Lets work together to minimize our challenges.
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Next
 IT opportunities in Ethiopia outweigh the challenges…
 Coming soon … “Key IT opportunity in Ethiopia”
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References
 Cobit 5-A Business Framework for the Governance and Management of
Enterprise IT
 https://www.devex.com/news/the-five-key-challenges-in-implementing-ict-for-
development-82499
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