#CIOYEAR AHEAD: Reshaping the Industry

There’s no doubt that predicting a pragmatic future for emerging economies requires guts from thought-leaders inspired to add value into ecosystems that better lives. This couldn’t be reflected better as was at the CIO Year Ahead Conference that brought together ‘C’-level technology thinkers comprising: CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, CMOs, IT Directors and Senior IT Executives together.

Under the theme “Reshaping the Industry” the delegates in the overall focussed on how to deploy technologies that add value to the enterprise ecosystem and further break barriers of distrust in systems that hinder development and service delivery to humanity.

Following realities that have since hastened the pace for digital transformation in enterprises, the delegates couldn’t agree more on the need of re-envisaging and re-inventing their operations so as to offer valuable customer experience.

While kick-starting the pace of the interactive session, Ms Laura Chite, CEO – CIO East Africa pointed out on realities that shall in 2018 continue to shape how business enterprises and public sector re-imagine their operations to stay relevant.

To sustain the momentum of engagement among organizations shaping the connected future, CIO East Africa unveiled four regional summits for 2018. Ms Chite pointed out that the summit were designed to draw industry thought-leaders, wheelers and dealers together purposely to reflect on progress, regulations and innovations that shall continue to shape the future of the national and regional economies.

The digital journey

Harry Hare, Chairman – CIO East Africa couldn’t pick the queue better as he ran a random poll to get a feel how enterprises are getting on with digital transformative.

“Twenty years ago, neither government nor any of the business enterprises in the entire Eastern African region had CIOs, yet we advocating for such strategic thinkers started back then” said Louis Otieno – Director, Corporate Affairs – Microsoft4Africa adding: “Fast-track to today, it delights to see hundreds of strategic IT leaders converge to chart the future of how enterprises can incrementally add value to national and regional economies, without pitching products for sale.”

Times have changed and it continues to take the deliberate effort of the leadership in government and progressive enterprises to draw lessons from consultants, appreciate insights from innovators and solution providers, Ms Chite asserted.

She underscored the fact that it becomes easy to predict and recognize trends that have the greatest impact and potential when experts collaborate and deliberately take a time-out to network while drawing lessons from varied case studies.

“My biggest take home in this immersive engagement is for industry players to seize the opportunity created by absence of legacy systems is to re-imagine and re-invent their businesses by leapfrog into digitized systems which add value to the enterprises,” Mariam Abdullahi, SAP Africa Industry Lead – Telecommunication who was the conference’s session moderator said reviewing the speakers’ presentations in summary.

Picking from the Regional Director, SAGE East Africa Nikki Summers’ presentation titled: Innovative Leadership in a High Velocity Environment, Ms Abdullahi noted that her take home was: “Thought-leaders should take the courage to learn how to fail and therefore take even better risks and decisions to make the enterprises purposeful and successful.”

Other take homes bordered in cyber-security, which Ms Karein Borheim, FABS CEO and Joseph Mathenge COO, Serianu stressed the need of enterprises to consistently be on the look-out. While Karein expressed the need for enterprises to re-look into the date of General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect from May 25, 2018, Mathenge emphasized on the need for vigilance. Data protection should not in the overall be seen to stifle growth.

 

Disruption is the answer

Presentation by Lenin Oyuga’s, Director, Government & Legal Business – East Africa & Indian Ocean Islands challenged enterprises from underestimating the potential for faster growth in the already hyper-connected world. While automobiles took time to catch on because potential drivers had to wait for construction of roads and gas stations to be built, today’s disruptive innovations are relying on infrastructure that is bridging confidence levels and breaking connectivity barriers.

“The digital revolution is changing at a faster pace in the region and East Africa is leading from the front. Technological disruption is transforming markets and societies across in ways that wouldn’t have been possible even five years ago. And this opens up huge and still largely untapped commercial potential for domestic and international businesses” Oyuga opined.

One of the great advantages East Africa has over other continents in riding the disruptive wave is that there’s far less legacy to get in the way than in other regions, creating a clean sheet on which companies can develop their own distinctive business models, Oyuga stressed.

 

Blockchain to enhance governance

In a moving presentation on How Blockchain Could Eventually Change The Way Kenya Governments Functions, Fernando Wangila, Head of ICT and CIO at National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) said time had come for thought-leaders and engineers to bridge the transparency gap in systems.

In his assessment Wangila noted that blockchain’s influence in public sector will be mostly behind the scenes. “This is despite the fact that blockchain technology has the potential to bring about efficiency to a wide range of services and seamless processes in government,” Wangila blurted as he highlighted the challenge of quick adoption to bureaucracy.

Of importance he stressed that the journey of how government agencies should incorporate blockchain into the way they function today has already began at NTSA through private blockchain technology.  “If ICT Authority fast-tracks the networking of all government agencies the business enterprises will have no choice but to onboard their ledger on blockchain,” a move that will spur the economy and bridge transperancy,” he confidently said.

Blockchain, one of the underlying technologies for the hot cryptocurrency bitcoin, is a platform lined to add value in public governance said Wangila. “This is a technology that creates a digital record across hundreds or thousands of computers, vastly reducing the risk of hacking.

Optimistic that more companies shall in 2018, join or begin to use programming interfaces, or software connecting different databases – a structured blockchain that shall make it easy to get data from sensors in a warehouse as accessing websites and mobile phones keep track of transactions, said Wangila.

“When manufacturers, retailers, financial and insurance establishments, regulators, and transportation companies have real-time data from sensors imbedded on products, trucks and ships, everyone in the distribution chain can benefit from insights that they were previously unable to get,” explained Wangila stating that in blockchain companies and consumers shall can as equally rest easy since their most valuable data on blockchain cannot be hacked.

“Everyone’s changes appear instantly on each user’s copy of the ledger and are encrypted in a way so that they can’t be changed or deleted. Thus, each new block is permanently linked onto an unbreakable chain,” said Wangila citing that it would fix challenges in national elections, insurance, property ownership such as land, houses and vehicles among others.

Connecting the Disconnection

In yet another mind-blowing presentation titled Cultivating the Next Generation of Talent, Martin Mirero, CIO Huduma Kenya literally provoked the thoughts of the delegates following his passionate recommendations and challenge to the academia.

Bluntly, Mirero criticized the education system. “There’s disconnect in the current education system since it is skewed for an industrial world yet we’re increasingly living to connected and cognitive world”. He startled the thoughts of the CIO peers with his assertion that time had come for enterprises to adapt to technology trends but above all uproot the current model of tertiary education and replace it by adopting  – development operations – DevOps for Education!

“Let the primary learning environment be the workplace…and inject tertiary education into that…The service provider MUST work in the environment of the user,” he stunned the audience with his radical recommendation.

Proactive governance

In yet another worthwhile revelation to peers in the industry, Francis Mwaura, Head of Standards and Processes at ICT Authority pointed out that the Kenyan Government has taken the deliberate step to adopt the use of ICTs in stimulating social economic growth as espoused in Vision 2030 strategic blueprint.

The clear task ahead for the government is to modernize and upgrade its internal ICT systems as foundation for accelerated service delivery. The challenge at hand is that there is no service centralized repository of persons data hence the need to logically consolidate all persons databases into a National Persons Master Database that will be the Single Source of Truth for identity information, said Mwaura.

“There is need to establish a comprehensive National Master Database anchored on the birth register for citizens, and primary registration of foreigners and which becomes the single source of truth data source for all persons,” stressed Mwaura noting that this would be a major undertaking for ICT Authority in 2018, a move that’s expected to add value into business enterprises as well.