Why The Top CIO100 Projects Beat The Odds

Somewhere in the days after the CIO100 shortlist went public, a CIO, a project lead or a whole transformation team scrolled down the names, looking for their own, and did not find it. It is a familiar sting. The project was real, the budget was spent and the team put in the hours. So what did the judges see?

We put that question to two of them while scoring was still under way. Francis Thairo, who heads Innovation and Technology Solutions at Kyoshinet, is a first-time judge reading submissions through an East African lens. Ahmed Atere, director and co-founder of MEED Networks Ltd in Nigeria, is on his third CIO100 panel and brings a West African view. They scored different entries and come from different markets, yet kept returning to the same handful of weaknesses. Neither was speaking about any particular submission. They were describing patterns across the stacks of entries in front of them, roughly 90 per judge by Thairo’s count.

The technology is rarely the verdict

If there is one thing to take from both conversations, it is that judges are not marking your technology stack. Thairo says the scoring rests on five themes: business value and impact, which carries the highest weighting; strategic alignment; how well the technology accelerates that strategy; innovation, new to the criteria this year; and return on investment. Ask him what ultimately separates a shortlisted project from one that just misses, and he does not hedge.

“Bottom line, business value and strategic alignment. That is what carries the day all the time, irrespective of whether your budget was $1,000 or tens of millions of dollars. That project is going to transform the organisation it is impacting,” he says.

In practice, a modest project with a clear line to what the organisation is trying to achieve can beat an expensive one with no such line. It also means the fashionable label counts for little. Innovation, in Thairo’s telling, is judged on application rather than vocabulary.

“It is not just about buzzwords of AI and machine learning and IoT. It is how you apply it,” he says. “Yes, I know we’ve got a lot of AI going around, using ChatGPT to make reports. No, it’s not that. It is to make that step change for the business, the institution or the stakeholder.”

Atere has seen the same temptation up close. Some entrants, he says, hear “AI” and want a piece of it, but forget the primary goal of the organisation. The panel wants the two to match.

Pilots, promises and payback periods

Atere’s most pointed advice concerns how projects present their results. A pilot can still earn marks, he explains, but it will not score highly, because the panel is looking for finished work and proven impact.

“When you have a pilot project, you’re going to get a score for it, but not a very high score, because the focus is more on impact,” he says. “You get a very high score when you have told us this was your ROI, you’ve been able to achieve it, and this is the impact it has had. And you must tie it back to your organisational goals.”

Thairo does not write pilots off, but he wants them to have a purpose. “It doesn’t mean that pilots are failures,” he says. “It should be the other way around: what do you want to learn from that pilot, so that you can invest in a transformation project that gives you a good return and value?” He also points to the pace of change. A 36-month project risks delivering a solution to a business challenge that has been overtaken by events, he argues, and the projects he expects to carry weight now run for three or six months.

Then there are the numbers. Atere says a recurring weakness is returns that simply do not add up.

“A lot of people will say they want to get their money back in six months. Six months is not realistic. You’re barely finishing your project, it started six or seven months ago, and you’re reporting your ROI in six months. The six months is already part of when you started. By now you should be telling me you’ve got your money, not that you’re looking forward to getting it.”

Inflated figures do not help either. “It’s not about you telling us you have 300%, 400%. We don’t need that,” Atere says. “What we need is progressive growth. If your project is very impactful and you have productive growth, then it’s a solid project.” He recalls one entry that solved a long-standing challenge and won him over even though it made little money. “The fact that you have made things easy for people, the impact is there.” For him, impact comes ahead of revenue.

Plans that cannot outlive the budget

Budgets get the same scrutiny. Atere describes one entry that put half its resources into hardware for a countrywide rollout that was plainly headed for the cloud, and others that committed around a quarter of spending to managed services. Both leave the project dependent on money that may not come next year, particularly in the public sector.

“From the ground up, you must design sustainability,” he says. “What if we don’t get the budget for this next year? How does this project sustain itself and move beyond?” His suggestion is partnership. Bring in a private stakeholder to co-manage the infrastructure and share revenue, and the project can keep paying for its own power and upkeep after the original funding runs out.

Thairo arrives at partnerships from another direction: skills. Entrants, he says, are often paying good money for emerging technologies like ML and AI and using very little of it. “You find out that paying a good dollar amount to access these technologies, but the application in that business is very, very low.” The tools themselves are within reach, he notes, with some available from as little as $1,000 or $2,000 per month. The mining ingredient in most CIO100 2026 edition applications is using the partners to fill the skill gap in emerging technologies. The panel was looking out for a good mix of skills built internally and skills brought in from a partner or solution provider. “It’s not looking at just this technology, but seeing who else can I work with to apply this technology.”

Built to be used

The last weakness is the one Atere says is easiest to overlook. A system can be delivered on time and on budget and still fail if nobody switches to it.

“You should realise that the way things work in Africa, adoption is very, very critical. So it’s better for us to also plan for change management,” he says. “It’s not enough to do a project that will digitise the entire infrastructure. It’s another project to see how you want people to adopt that process and leave what they were doing before. You can spend a whole lot of money on the project, and if nobody uses it, that’s the end of the project.”

Thairo links this to a point on leadership. Projects that stall, he says, often suggest either that the wrong thing was built or that the business was never ready, which is why executive buy-in beyond the IT department matters so much to the panel.

What to do before the next call for entries

Atere adds one reassurance for entrants wondering whether a lesser-known name counted against them. This year, he says, identifying details were stripped from the marking, including organisation names and certain sensitive information, so that judges do not know who they are assessing and bias is kept out of the scoring. The fix, in other words, lies in the project and in how it is written up.

Read together, the two judges’ advice is a checklist. Start from the business goal and show how the project serves it. Report completed work with measured results, not forecasts. Keep your ROI figures modest and believable. Plan for adoption and for the year the budget shrinks. Bring in partners where your own skills run thin.

Atere’s own message to next year’s entrants fits in a line: “Let us be realistic.”

Thairo, for his part, expects this year’s strongest entries to become case studies at the CIO100 events, giving CIOs a look at what well-run projects actually look like. For organisations that missed out this time, they may also be the best preview of what next year’s panel will reward.