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IT consultant Tendayi Chirokote was working for African telco Telecel Zimbabwe when Zimbabwean insurer Zimnat tasked him with spearheading a digital transformation at the company . “ I was working with Telecel Zimbabwe for about four years and before that Econet Wireless for about seven to eight years ,” he explains . “ Yeah , it was quite exciting coming up with a lot of mobile solutions : mobile money , money farming and mobile tracking , plus a lot of work integrating the Econet business into one ERP solution .”
Insurance had become a dirty word across the African continent since the economic collapse of 2008 had seen so many companies go to the wall . Needing to remodel the public ’ s perception of insurance , particularly when times were tough , led Zimnat to pursuing better communications both externally and internally . “ Zimnat were in need of a digital transformation drive ,” Chirokote explains . “ They wanted to go into an omnichannel environment , driven digitally and I had experience of integration work , and a lot of experience from a digital product perspective .”
In September 2017 , Zimnat tasked Chirokote with looking at the current technological infrastructure , focussing on its
hardware and connectivity ahead of transforming the business over the following three to five years . “ I took a good look at the IT space and recommended a strategy of how to structure and take the business from bricks and mortar to a fully digital environment .
“ The first area we looked at was the legacy technology , which was not at the level where the business needed to be . We put in place plans to modernise the
JULY 2018