Mrs. Omobola Johnson, minister of Communication Technology, said that an assessment of the nation’s software industry landscape has revealed that dual points of innovation process and companies, not code are the critical aspects to tackle in order to tap into the potentials.

She made the remark at the ISPON 2013 National Software Conference and Competition in Calabar, Cross River State. 

Johnoson regretted that several billions of naira leave the shores of Nigeria every year as licences and other fees to foreign software companies. 

“This doesn’t have to be. Software Strategies for us as a country must be not only about improving productivity because it also provides an avenue for transforming the economy, creating jobs and creating wealth. So we need to tackle the broader challenge of how we take our promising software developers and software engineers and help them to become entrepreneurs that can take advantage of this opportunity?,” Johnson remarked.

While extolling ISPON for this year’s theme, “Software Strategies for Retooling the Workforce”, she added that Software has indeed accelerated productivity in the workplace, “for example the simple word processing tools and spreadsheet tools that we had in the 80’s to the more encompassing office productivity tools such as the Microsoft Office suite .

“From simple accounting packages to the sophisticated Enterprise Resource Planning applications that support the entire organisational functions, HR, Accounting, Finance, Logistics, Billing, Procurement etc’, I am sure you can think of many other examples of the impact that software has made to workplace productivity”. 

She maintained that with an accepted and well documented failure rate of 90% in the software enterpreneurship space, stakeholders must accelerate and scale up the innovation process.

Johnson said: “Silicon Valley and Israel (a country that has earned the appellation of “start up nation’) have literally thousands of companies in the ideation or start up stage at any point in time, the outcome of which is tens of companies that are either acquired by the bigger players or go on to become big players themselves. (Shopping.com acquired by ebay for $620m, face.com a face recognition software acquired by Facebook for $100m.

“We have made some progress in the short time that the Ministry of Communication Technology has been in existence. There is a thriving ecosystem of innovation hubs with the private sector participating well through the Co-Creation Hub, Venia Business Hub and others.

“The government has also intervened with the set up of the iDEA hubs in Lagos and Calabar (with more to come) which aim to cover both the innovation and ideation process as well as accelerating the process from ideation to business creation. Our first cohort of incubates at the iDEA hubs were drawn from the developers that provided solutions adjudged as having potential by the Oil & Gas as well as financial sectors. Our next cohort will be tasked with building solutions for the Agriculture, industry, an effort being designed together with USAID…

“We are open to ideas as to the what solutions should be tackled next as we believe that software solutions that come out of our industry should be designed to meet particular needs, commercial as well as social and of course be exportable to other countries.

“We would do well to benchmark ourselves against other regional economies like Kenya and South Africa. The global success of the Kenyan Ushahidi platform shows we have a long way to go as we do not as yet have the one (or more) software solutions that have international appeal and are instantly recognizable as Nigerian.  The South African software industry, with its exports of homegrown fraud prevention, revenue management solutions, mobile applications as well as an instantly recognized Open Source platform (Ubuntu) drives home this point.

“Ideally, these kinds of hubs should grow organically in Universities, Cyber cafes, libraries as access to the Internet improves but it will be much easier to roll out a clear philosophy through a connected network of hubs started by the government but ultimately will be run by the private sector”.

She added that the philosophy must also instill in the nation’s entrepreneurs the freedom to experiment that will truly free their ideation process. Too many software solutions that are released these days follow the familiar, safe path of former successes in entertainment (for example) or simply put a Nigerian twist on solutions that have succeeded elsewhere.

“While addressing the structural issues that should encourage our entrepreneurs to concentrate on “Companies, not code”, we must also ensure we do not take the technical requirements of this industry for granted.

“Many of our software developers are self-taught and while this is admirable, it also means that any errors in coding can be carried over for several “generations” of developers. To guard against this, the setup of coding schools will be encouraged and supported where necessary by the government – similar to our support and interventions in the innovation hubs/accelerators.

“This is an intense process that requires the all the proverbial hands to be on deck and I call on ISPON to collaborate intensely with us on all these initiatives to achieve their ultimate vision of a vibrant, competitive and world class software industry,” she noted.