Meet Previous CIO Of The Year Award Winners

The sixth edition of the CIO100 Symposium & Awards will soon be here. The event recognises excellence in the adoption and use of IT. Both organisations and individual CIOs or equivalents in organisations are awarded. Here are some of the previous award winners for the years gone by:

Engineer Wainaina Mungai, CIO of The Year, 2013

Engineer Mungai is currently the Director of FixMyWard, an organisation developing technology platforms for addressing development issues such as public participation in governance. He was the Head of ICT at Royal Media Services from 2010 to 2014 where he led the ICT for Efficiency and Effectiveness in Media project in 2012/13 involving applications development for newsrooms, election monitoring, audio/video streaming and HR Systems. During his leadership, Royal Media Services Ltd. developed a paperless newsroom using an in-house news vault application. The system uses a web-based library search system implemented based on user feedback.

Other IT  implementations the firm has include streaming for eight FM stations and a TV station. A tapeless news playout has improved reliability and reduced the task involving searching 12 years of tape footage. The company also pioneered the use of Google Hangouts on television on International Women’s Day.

The initiative saw Royal Media reach 1 million monthly viewers on the Internet for Citizen TV. Egesa FM, which broadcasts in Kisii, can now reach over 45,000 online listeners monthly. Printing costs have been greatly reduced too. He also led the technical development of the web-based Elections Reporting System project for the 2013 elections and integrated it with the electoral commission’s results systems to display results verified by data clerks via the on-air graphics system.

He implemented the ICT Infrastructure Transformation project in 2010/2011 involving WAN, LAN, a data centre, internet connectivity with BGP and multihoming for redundancy where basic network infrastructure, a data centre and an ICT management office were previously lacking. The project led a CIO100 industry award.

Kevin Kinyanjui, CIO of the Year, 2014

Kevin Kinyanjui, CIO of Kenya Airways, is an IT management specialist who has been in the IT industry since 1986. He started his career as a systems developer, moving on to people capacity development in IT, then IT management consultancy. He has been in CIO roles in IT in busy commercial environments since 1995. First for Bamburi Cement (manufacturing), then Housing Finance (banking & finance) and now Kenya Airways (service and airlines). Kinyanjui was crowned 2014 CIO of the Year, taking over from Eng Wainaina Mungai of Royal Media Services who walked away with the award in the 2013 edition.

Through his stewardship in the IT Department, Kenya Airways developed a Baggage Management System (BMS) which utilises emerging technologies to promote passenger safety and reduce baggage mishandling. The system also provides visibility on passengers’ bag location throughout their journey and avails this information to Kenya Airways employees, ground handling agents and most importantly, its flight passengers via all customer touchpoints.

BMS uses wireless mobility, big data and complex event processing which enables the association of data in real-time. Working from a centralised database, the system receives and maintains all baggage-related data and associated events such as checked-in, loaded, and offloaded from an airline Departure Control System, DCS.

The BMS system then reconciles this data with data input from baggage scans along the path to the aircraft. It ensures that only bags for a particular flight are loaded into the flight and that only bags whose passengers have boarded the flight are also loaded. Centralizing the data offers real-time information to Hub connection points as well as Outstations, enabling key baggage information to be seamlessly shared ensuring consistency, and visibility throughout the operation. This innovation saw him scoop the award in 2014.

Jack Maina, CIO of The Year, 2015

He is currently the CIO for Britam. Before that, Maina was the Head of IT and Innovation at Safaricom. He also held the position of Business Systems Development Manager /IT Strategy Manager at Safaricom for four years. Maina also oversees the Jawabu Project which saw him get the CIO of The Year Award, 2015. The Jawabu Project is designed to deliver the technology capabilities required to deliver the best customer experience. The project was developed in partnership with Oracle, IBM, Fadata, and PwC, among others.

With products ranging from life, health and general insurance, pensions, unit trusts, investment planning, wealth management, off-shore investments, retirement planning, discretionary portfolio management, property development and Private Equity, Jawabu helps automate key business processes, reducing time-consuming manual tasks and paperwork, increasing efficiency and enhance controls. It also provides a single view of the customer, as well as customer intelligence which allows financial advisors to focus on analysis as opposed to data crunching and paperwork, increasing efficiency and enhancing controls. It also provides a single view of the customer, as well as customer intelligence which allows financial advisors to focus on analysis as opposed to data crunching.

We can’t wait to see who will be the CIO of the Year, 2016.