Harvey Nash / KPMG CIO Survey 2020

Explore how leading IT organizations are reacting to COVID-19 impacts.

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The survey had over 4,200 CIOs and technology leaders’ respondents from 83 countries. In East Africa, we had over 90 respondents from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia.

This year’s report references both pre-COVID-19 findings as well as during COVID-19 responses. Together they give us a unique insight into the before, during, and continuing aftermath of the pandemic.

There is no doubting the pandemic’s dramatic effect on almost every aspect of business and life. The pandemic exposed a growing digital divide, shifted some priorities, and amplified many of the challenges that the IT organization faced prior to COVID-19. However, fundamentals also remain, such as the top two priorities for boards: 1) improving operational efficiency; and 2) improving customer engagement – both long-standing priorities of the technology leader.

Some entered the pandemic better positioned to pivot and scale into new opportunities. In our special report , we share four models of economic recovery patterns. While recovery will be unique to each sector, country, and company – common to all is the urgency to act decisively.

Key highlights from East Africa include:

Surge in technological spend – More than half of respondents in East Africa said that their technology expenditure increased by 10% – 30% as a result of the pandemic. However, despite the huge surge of spending, security & privacy ranked top investment for CIOs during Covid-19. 5 in 10 leaders report that their company has experienced more cyber-attacks. 50% of the attacks were from phishing and 37% from malware suggesting that the massive move to home working has increased exposure from employees. At the same time, organizations have struggled to find skilled cyber security professionals to support this dramatic shift to homeworking – and report that cyber security (33%) is among the top 5 ‘in demand’ technology skills in East Africa.
Digital companies pull away – Digital Leaders were more likely than non-digital leaders to make additional technology investments as a result of COVID-19 – with 66% of organizations that are ‘very’ or ‘extremely effective’ at using digital technologies spending an additional 15 - 30%. These investments focused on large-scale implementations of SaaS (23%) and Distributed Cloud (19%). The crisis has served to emphasize a growing divide between organizations driving their strategy through technology, and those that aren’t.
Concerns over mental health – 7 in 10 IT leaders during COVID-19 are concerned about the mental health of their team, which has resulted in 5 in 10 IT leaders putting programs in place to support their staff.
Cloud investment up – After investment in security and privacy (50%), investment in infrastructure and the cloud was the third most important technology investment during COVID-19, with 30% of IT leaders actively considering Distributed Cloud
Skills shortages – Prior to COVID-19, 2020 skills shortages remained close to an all-time high. Subsequently, shortages in tech talent have remained high, only marginally dropping compared to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In addition to cyber security (33%), we have advanced analytics (39%), intelligent automation (39%), cloud (33%) and enterprise architecture and organizational change management (33%) as the top 5 “ in demand” technology skills in East Africa.