SOFTtribe: Software Development Company in Ghana
David Kwamena Bolton has almost 20 years experience in the IT and ICT industry in the UK and Africa, and he is now responsible for the technical direction of IT company SOFTtribe, which is Ghana’s leading software developer.
Interview with David Kwamena Bolton, Technical Director of SOFTtribe
Could you tell us about your experience and involvement 30 years ago in the NHS in the UK?
We have been in the West African side of the industry for 20 years now and we are working on a lot of government based projects and one of the largest projects we have is the government payroll. We are paying over half a million people on this system.
Well, I grew up in the UK and I got into IT at a very early age. By the time I was about 14 years old I was running my own software company and I developed some software that ran the National Health Service and the general practitioners in the clinics and so on. We developed the software that would hold things like the medical records of all the patients and all of the appointments for screening, etc. So I developed this software which was taken on by the NHS and the Royal College of General Practitioners and I became very successful from a very young age in the IT industry.
It was a very good experience but I found was that it wasn’t that fulfilling because I was dealing in a space that had so many players already. That was when I found my roots, my mum is Ghanaian and my dad is Scottish and so I came to Ghana. I was invited by the government to come to Ghana in the early 1990s when there was very little on the ground in terms of IT. So when you went into an organisation that had no IT technology, that was writing everything down manually, you could go in and actually transform that organisation and you could really see the difference you were making. It wasn’t as if you were only tweaking something, for example adding the latest feature to a new car, I mean in that case it means you already have a car!
Let’s talk about what you are doing now? You are working in lots of different projects now of course.
Yes. We have been in the West African side of the industry for 20 years now and we are working on a lot of government based projects and one of the largest projects we have is the government payroll. Our software runs the payroll of the civil service and the Ghana education service and so on. We are paying over half a million people on this system. Obviously it is a very mission critical system that has national security implications and all sorts of other issues attached to it, etc. so it is a high pressure environment and very challenging.
Why does your company have the best skills to offer this?
Every environment is unique. It is like bringing a Mercedes Benz that is designed to run on the autobahn in Germany and then bringing it onto a rough road in Africa, it won’t last very long before it breaks down. The same thing applies to technology, when you are designing software you have to look at the environment. There are lots of challenges with regard to bandwidth and electricity and also the level of experience that users have with these systems, therefore you have to design something with all of this in mind so that it works in the environment in which it is intended to be used in.