CIOs and other technology leaders have made a call for African companies to capitalise on the continent's burgeoning digital landscape in order to remain in business.

Consistent with a report by consulting firm Accenture on the risk that this disruption presents, executives participating at panel discussion during the two-day IT Leaders Africa Summit in Johannesburg rang alarm bells.

Lloyd Jones, Group IT Executive: Analytics and Business Intelligence at Eskom told the audience that his organisation is becoming more aware of the power of digitisation.

"I think the motivation to why you do this is whether you still want to be in business tomorrow and if you want to be a business that is still relevant to the market place tomorrow, you better start digitising it today. If you don't, there is a whole ecosystem of disruptors that are ready to nibble away at your value chain and to disintermediate you away from your customer, away from your value chain, away from your supply chain."

Dr. Roze Phillips, Managing Director of Accenture's products industry group in South Africa, West Africa and East Africa, echoed Jones' view.

Speaking to ITWeb Africa about her team's report on the subject, titled In Flavour of Digital Phillips emphasised the inevitability of digital disruption in Africa and detailed how Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs) in particular should respond.

"I really want consumer goods companies on the continent to recognise the potential and opportunity that they have, but at the same time they must recognise that the opportunity and potential is here and now, and they really have to start thinking about their digital strategy because it doesn't happen overnight. You have to build something and the best time to do it is now. In fact there is a 152 billion US dollar conservative opportunity up for grabs over the next five years if they do take the leap."

Dr Phillips says the consumer and entrepreneurial potential of Africa's young population, who are mostly digital natives, is yet to be exploited - and with the advent of the cloud and mobile technology, which minimise or eliminate infrastructure challenges and increase access, a new challenge has emerged.

"If you look at where the world is going, since 2000, 52% of Fortune 500 companies today don't exist anymore and we anticipate that another forty percent of those companies will be gone in the next ten years. If you look at the companies that are dominant, they are the likes of Apple, the likes of Google, Amazon, Airbnb and Alibaba. These are all digital organisations that are taking apart the traditional business model of other companies. We are saying that the consumer company goods company leaders- the CEO, CMO, CFO, the chief digital officer - should be preoccupied with how the new landscape is going to change their business model because, quite frankly, I worry that they will either go out of business or their products service will no longer be relevant."

Sihle Mthiyane, Head IT at Thales and Abdul Baba, CIO of Skynet, both panelists at the ICT Africa Summit, recommended that companies ensure that they are connected with customers and that they move at the customer's speed in order to derive full benefit from digitisation.

Dr Phillips cited Safaricom's iCow as well as the use of customer's overall behaviour in order to set insurance premiums by Discovery as instances where digitalisation has been embraced by African companies who have gone beyond providing a product into giving the consumer an experience.