ICT sector should get ready for the fourth industrial revolution

There is no doubt that we have completed a long journey towards the implementation of the Digital Bangladesh vision and our industry has also become much more stable while some IT companies are doing really good in the local and foreign markets.

The country has already hit the landmark of earning an export revenue of $1 billion from the ICT sector and is getting big projects from the international market, which highlight the industry's spiralling growth.

Now the industry is on the verge of facing the impacts of the fourth industrial revolution or 4IR and it will be a major challenge for the industry.

During the 4IR, there will be dominance of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, internet of things (IOT), robotics, big data, augmented reality and others.

These developments beg the question: how much is our industry prepared to adopt these technologies?

A developed country like South Korea is now fighting the novel coronavirus by relying on its technological forte in AI and machine learning.

If we want to be a real digitalised country, we also need to take the challenge to solve local problems with the help of ICT following the footprint of Korea. And the opportunity is huge here.

But we still lag behind others in terms of taking preparation for adopting those technologies and creating skilled manpower to grab the opportunities.

Every year thousands of graduates come out from universities with engineering degrees. But they are not well qualified to grab a pie of this huge outsourcing/offshore development market.

In a country like Bangladesh, we always depend on the government to do everything for us. Yes, the government should definitely play a vital role in terms of policy support and providing other strategical facilities. But the government can never run fast like the private sector.

In fact, no government in the world can run at the same pace as the private sector. So, the industry should take steps themselves to prepare the resources and to grab the billion-dollar market that will emerge in the next decade.

The first step is to minimise the gap and strengthen collaboration between the industry and academia. University curriculums are still unable to meet the industry's demand that is going to be created in the coming days.

Special focus should be given on the emerging technologies and there should be a provision of six-month internships for each student so that they can gain some practical knowledge from the industry and prepare themselves before coming to the job market.

To achieve the target of $5 billion export earnings by 2025, we should focus more on the market and industry. We also need to find out which technologies we are really good at.

Japan will be one of the pioneers in the 4IR and a huge offshore development market is going to be created for the emerging technologies.

It is said that Japan will be in a shortage of more than four lakh skilled engineers by 2025, for which they are desperately looking towards the offshore development partners.

Over 50 per cent population of Bangladesh are aged below 25 and the country can definitely utilise the power of the youths to achieve more growth.

The positive thing is that Bangladesh has been seriously considering the Japanese market since 2014 and some of the companies are doing really good in this market.

But we are falling behind others due to the language barrier, while Vietnam has done very good.

It has been reported that most of the Japanese companies prefer Vietnam over Bangladesh, as Vietnamese engineers can speak Japanese fluently because of learning the language from the school level.

That's why Bangladesh is lagging behind Vietnam despite providing more quality work. Time has come for the industry and the government to address this issue.

The government has introduced a project called BJET (Bangladesh-Japan ICT Engineers' Training Programme), where we teach them Japanese language and etiquettes. But the number of students we are producing per batch is not even close to the demand we have in our market.

Another point is that we also need to produce adequate number of graduates skilled in emerging technologies.

Like Japan, countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland are also going to witness negative population growth, which is why they are also looking for skilled engineers and outsource partners.

But the European market has been very difficult for Bangladesh in the recent years because of the rise of Ukraine and Poland in the tech sector. Most European countries are now preferring to go to Ukraine and Poland rather than coming to Southeast Asia.

We have another big market we have always ignored: Africa. In the next 10 to 15 years, it will be a great market for the ICT companies.

Some African countries like Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya and Ghana are now thinking to digitalise their countries, a journey that Bangladesh began 10 years ago.

So, the time is ripe for Bangladeshi ICT companies to focus on that market. As more than 100 Bangladeshi companies have the experience of completing large-scale ICT projects, they will have an edge over others if they become the first movers.

In a nutshell, it's today that will decide where we will go tomorrow. If we can't take the right step today, our industry will lose a great opportunity.

All the parties, including the government, private sector and academia, should sit together and make a masterplan to be the leader in the ICT sector in the next decade and become the next ICT destination. 

The author is the managing director of Dream71 Bangladesh Ltd and a director of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services.