The Heritage We Don’t’ Talk About: The Beliefs Holding African Organisations Back from Digital Transformation

Every September, South Africa celebrates the heritage we can see and hear: our languages, food, music and ancestry. But another inheritance moves quietly through our organisations – a set of beliefs about information technology that still limits how African institutions adopt technology and benefit from it.

These beliefs emerged in another era as leaders solved real problems with the tools available to them. Yet they did not disappear when those leaders retired. They settled into “how we do things here”, shaping budgets, procurement and the assumptions employees absorb.

As millennials and Gen Z rise, will they inherit only the technology, or also the beliefs that constrain it? Those beliefs were reasonable responses to the constraints of another time, and deserve understanding, not contempt. But surviving today, and leading with real advantage, means leadership must now let some of them go.

Digital fluency is not digital transformation

People may be comfortable with smartphones, cloud platforms and instant information while working in a culture that treats IT as a cost centre, a silo or a threat. Unless these assumptions are dismantled, digitally fluent employees will learn to work around them, and may eventually defend the practices they once found irrational.

One enduring belief is that IT is the CIO’s responsibility. It allows executives to approve strategy without interrogating the technology, data or cybersecurity capabilities needed to deliver it. Its companion belief, that business leaders need not understand technology, is more consequential still. Leaders who would never admit ignorance of financial statements still say, “That’s not my area”, about technology.

King IV and COBIT make technology and information governance a board and executive responsibility. Leaders who cannot ask informed questions about data, cyber exposure or system integration are not governing technology; they are merely approving or rejecting what others place before them.

Procurement carries its own contradictions. Some organisations assume the cheapest solution is best; others equate an expensive global brand with quality. Both substitute price for value and avoid the harder question: is the solution fit for purpose over its full life cycle?

The belief that locally developed solutions are inferior sends capital, skills development and intellectual property offshore, while confining African technologists to support roles. It can produce systems poorly matched to local languages, regulation and infrastructure. Refusing to evaluate local capability objectively does not reduce risk; it entrenches dependency.

Fear that technology takes jobs also requires honesty. Automation can displace people. But using that risk to preserve inefficient processes sacrifices competitiveness without securing workers’ futures. Responsible transformation pairs technology with genuine investment in reskilling for higher-value roles.

Allocating the best devices by seniority rather than workload optimises status over productivity. Hoarding data as departmental power destroys the shared insight and integrated planning that digital systems should unlock.

Shadow IT is a warning about culture

Together, these beliefs produce a predictable result: shadow IT. When governance feels slow or irrelevant, leaders buy software on departmental cards, store information outside approved environments or appoint vendors without security review. They call it pragmatism, “getting the job done”,  but the organisation loses sight of its own technology footprint.

Data falls outside compliance controls, systems fail to integrate and vulnerabilities multiply. When something breaks, the CIO is blamed for risks the technology team never saw. Shadow IT is a governance and trust problem. It is the cost of treating technology as someone else’s responsibility.

Workaround culture then becomes an inheritance: policy exists on paper, decisions happen outside it, and each new generation of leaders inherits a system where governance is something to route around rather than rely on.

Digital natives can inherit an analogue culture

These beliefs came from generations that built organisations amid genuine resource constraints, failures that encouraged risk aversion, and hierarchies that rewarded caution. The beliefs addressed real limitations and are not personal failings. But the world they were built for has moved on.

A Gen Z analyst denied cross-departmental data learns that hoarding is normal. A millennial IT manager forced to defend every budget line learns that technology is a cost to contain rather than a capability to champion. Culture can be more durable than technology.

Unless we interrupt this transmission, we risk a generation with world-class digital skills operating inside organisations with pre-digital mindsets that deliver incremental improvement where transformation was possible.

Choosing a different inheritance

The answer is not another technology project. It is a leadership and governance reset. Boards and executives must share accountability for technology outcomes and treat digital literacy as a continuing leadership requirement, alongside financial literacy.

Investment should be judged by total value and fitness for purpose, not price or prestige.

Local capability must be assessed fairly and developed as a strategic asset. Automation should be paired with credible reskilling. Technology must be funded as infrastructure for value creation, equipment allocated by role, and data governed as a shared asset, which is protected for security and privacy, but never hoarded for positional power.

Technology processes must become responsive enough that bypassing them is no longer the easiest route, while every executive is held accountable.

Heritage Month asks what deserves to be carried forward. Resilience, resourcefulness and community are worth preserving. Other habits were survival strategies for another time; retaining them may cost us the future we claim to want.

The organisations that thrive will have leaders courageous enough to challenge inherited constraints and build cultures where digital-era thinking can take root. What we pass on should not be obstacles for the next generation to work around, but a foundation on which they can build.

That is the heritage worth choosing.