Year after year the ICT Achievers Awards have been reduced to a comedy spectacle that seems to grow in magnitude each year. There are always big questions on the awards credibility and the organisers seem to quickly forget the gaffes just from a year ago.
In 2012, Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) received the “Top Public Sector website of the year” award although their website, www.zimbabwetourism.net was down. This year again, the ICT Achievers Awards discredited themselves by awarding yet another ghost website an award.
Courier Connect received the Best ICT Enabled Courier Company of the year side passing the likes of Swift, DHL and FedEx. To submit nominations for this category, you had to answer questions like “how does the company reach out to the public?” and “which online services do they offer to increase the efficiency of their business and at what cost?”
This would suggest the recipient of the award would have to display some degree of efficiency in online service delivery and engagement with customers. To our surprise however Courier Connect’s website is down, and not only that, if the Wayback Machine is anything to go by, the website hasn’t seen much uptime this year. The website was only crawled successfully once this year, and even then, the machine bumped into a nasty error. The website has clearly been down for a while. Google Search doesn’t even list it anymore.
That’s not all, in answering the question ‘how does the company reach to the public’, it’s quite clear that Courier Connect’s online efforts are quite poor as they only have 93 likes on Facebook Page and their last update was on 23 October 2013!
A typical response from the organisers will be “the vetting process starts 6 months before the actual awards”. But in any case, it is in doubt if Courier Connect has any credentials to bag the award at the expense of Swift which has over 2,400 Facebook likes, posts regularly, has a live functional website, uses tools such as Skype to communicate with customers instantly, and on the whole, appears to be run better than Courier Connect.
The questions that comes to mind amid other revelations of questionable awards is why does the Ministry of ICT and Courier Service waste money hosting awards that lack credibility. I say this because other companies like CSI and Econet fully deserve the recognition they received but all this is clouded by the less credible awards given to such recipients as Courier Connect and Sadomba-Mahari.
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8 comments
ok, i think you’re being a hater with this this post.. the award is for Best ICT Enabled Courier Company..not for a company that has a website online all the time. their main tracking site is actually http://ips-webtracking.zimpost.co.zw/trackit/ and this works better than even DHL or Fedex when tracking parcels sent from overseas. how do i know this? because i use it all the time for online orders that i make. With courier connect.. you even get a phone call when your boxes arrive… with DHL and Fedex.. its a case of “call us, we wont call you”. in short, get your facts straight…not everything from the ICT awards is a farce.
That’s true. They do have a tracking system so does Swift and theirs is accessible on their website. Like I alluded to on the article, the award criteria had key components on communicating with the public and with their website down, how are they doing that in a Tech sense? Personally I don’t believe any company that does not have a running website should be considered for a Tech related award.
thats the thing here.. dont make it personal. maybe they have a great IT setup behind closed doors that allow them to manage, handle, clear and communicate all the movements of a package to end users cheaply and efficiently (which is what they primarily do) .. then why not win the award..? they are doing a great job in my experience… better and cheaper than the big names too. so, i’ll give credit where credit is due.. and say well done to them
Agree with you.I think what lacks is actual descriptions of the ICT/courier efforts or products for which they deserve awards. I imagine nominations have briefs that accompany them. Those have been left out hence the blind ignorant backlash,which I am also party to.Perhaps Sadomba Mahari have some hidden project that got them the award. Though I’d bet u an hour long sprint on my toes that Sadomba is undeserving.
Right… Can someone not talk to Sadomba-Mahari and find out what they actually did coz I wanna know!!
SADOMBA MAHARI developed the android and symbian apps for the ICT
Achievers Awards, they manage the ICT Achievers Awards facebook page
(not sure about website) and one of the Maharis who is a preseneter at
Starfm recently hosted Kundishora at the Star Tech program on StarFM.
This is just a disclaimer ohhh. ZVAKUMAKER SENSE
NOW….http://www.zimagic.com/mobile/features.html
slow day at the techzim office?
Maybe its a plus with the judges to have your website down…..ever tried that?