The beauty of Ghana lies in its people. I was fortunate to learn this lesson first-hand from Joseph Amoh-Anti and the Josanti team as the Laserfiche Institute took its longest “road” trip yet, to West Africa.

Upon landing in the capitol city of Accra, I was immediately aware of the fact that I had arrived in a place entirely unlike anywhere I had been before. Driving along roads crowded with both cars and vendors—including many that balanced their wares upon their heads—there was a bit of culture shock that accompanied my jet lag. Fortunately, that first day was devoted to seeing some sites and resting up before a long week of training.

Our schedule was similar to Regional Training, starting with a workshop followed by a number of training sessions. Speaking to a large room of people, explaining the benefits of moving to a digital document management system, we answered questions and allayed fears of many people that were considering purchasing Laserfiche. We provided a lot of information and addressed many of their pressing questions, which dealt primarily with security and records management. Of course, search and retrieval is important, as it can replace the practice of sending four men to the basement in search of a file, only to have them give up after a couple of unsuccessful hours spent searching.

More important than the answers we gave, however, was the simple fact that we traveled there to discuss our system live and in person. Many Western industries are setting up local vendors in western Africa, but very few of them are willing to actually send representatives. Our presence in front of people from Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania showed a commitment to the region and made Laserfiche much more than a faceless California corporate entity.

After the initial workshop, the training began, starting with Records Management. I was surprised to see how big an issue this really is out there, but new laws keep coming out to ensure information is retained and managed appropriately. It was such a hot topic, in fact, that we opened the room for additional people to just sit and watch because all of our training machines were taken. After the session, Steve Hackney was approached by a potential customer who was happy that Laserfiche easily met all of his needs.

As the week progressed, we taught courses from our standard offerings, and even condensed some of them in order to pack in more classes to make the most of our time. We were happy to see that everybody in class was able to keep up with the material. English is the official language of Ghana, but the influences of the various tribal languages give it a flair all its own. We had to keep the idioms to a minimum, and we caught ourselves using certain analogies that did not make as much sense out there as they do here. Other big cultural adjustments were to ‘Africa time’—everybody shows up a bit later than the official starting time—and the frequent power outages.

In the evenings we had the chance to soak up some Ghanaian culture through music, food, and conversation. Throughout the whole training, Joseph and his team made sure that we were comfortable and well taken care of. His generosity and hospitality lent much to the success of this event and really showed off the friendliness that West Africa—and Ghana in particular—is known for. Everywhere we went, people with large smiles welcomed us and happily shared their culture with us.

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Posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 9:29 am under Blogs, Laserfiche Staff. You can comment on this post.