SOFTWARE solutions company (SAP) has been tipped to drive Information Technology (IT)-led innovation thus accelerating economic development.
In a question and answer session with our reporter, SAP Corporate Affairs Executive, Sunil Geness, said SAPs Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) vision “was based on the philosophy that IT-led innovation could drive economic development and parity through resource efficient growth”.
“But rapid economic transformation requires an educated workforce and sound governance systems to manage the transformation and keep pace with the changing enterprise, the surrounding social infrastructure and governing institutions.
“Therefore our CSR programme focuses strongly on education and good governance among others,” said Geness.
He said SAP was running a University Alliances Programme which provides SAP software to schools around the world for use within for-credit courses that were part of an undergraduate or graduate degree programme.
Geness said the goal was to assist faculties reinforce the concepts being taught in class to better understand how business processes happen and were supported in the “real world”, using state-of-the-art software.
“The programme offers a win-win proposition for all parties involved. In this way it increases its mind-share / name recognition whilst we are meeting the needs of partners/customers by helping provide an educated workforce.
“The Global University Alliances programme now has over 900 members today with about 200 000 students. In Africa more than 15 universities already run the SAP University Alliances programme whilst plans are afoot for an exponential expansion of the programme,” Geness said.
He added that as part of its CSR programme SAP also was an active partner of the CIDA University Information Communication Technology (ICT) Academy.
He said CIDA is a free University in Johannesburg, where students from severely disadvantaged backgrounds are given an opportunity free of charge to complete degree studies.
