Mitchell Cotts head of technology Dennis Katusya, Stanbic Uganda’s CIO Rita Apell, and BasiGo’s IT manager Nicholas Musau, weigh in on the contributions of technology towards business strategy and the tension between innovation and governance.
In his more than decade-long career in IT, Mitchell Cotts head of technology Dennis Katusya has come to believe that every organisation that wants to grow in today's world must embrace technology. However, Dennis advises that IT should be a strategic enabler rather than a department running its own agenda.
"Projects must be driven by the business needs and enabled by IT. When IT pushes a project, adoption is low compared to when the business takes the forefront and IT enables that the outcome is always good," he says.
Rita Apell, CIO at Stanbic Bank Uganda, shares Dennis' view, especially when it comes to the adoption of AI in business.
"You can't just start throwing AI solutions in there. All of them need to have some sort of positive impact either from a business growth perspective or operational efficiency. You need to see the value that is coming out of that," she says.
Under Rita's leadership, Stanbic Bank Uganda has taken a structured approach to identifying where AI can add value across the organisation, and the outcome has been positive.
"We ran a workshop for about a week where our business users came in and we were surprised because there were 140 use cases from the business. Then we had to do the prioritisation to say, okay, what do we go in for next year," she adds.
But while businesses strive to stay innovative with technology use, there's an ever growing tension between technology adoption and governance.
In the recently concluded CITO East Africa Tanzania launch, CIOs agreed that regulations are still a puzzle that they have to navigate, a sentiment that was shared by their Ugandan counterparts during a similar launch in May.
A main concern shared by CIOs is the lack of proper government policies that govern data privacy especially in the age of AI adoption.
“Everything that’s coming now has an AI factor and we must be concerned about data protection and data privacy. People upload a lot of information, some of which may be sensitive. This is a major problem since they do not know where AI dumps that data,” says BasiGo’s IT manager Nicholas Musau.
Nicholas is especially worried by the fact that Kenya does not have a specialised AI framework even though currently being regulated through the data protection act 2019, the proposed National AI framework aims to bridge this gap.
His advice to companies is to ensure that data is used correctly adding that over exposure may have grave consequences in the future.
Some organisations like Stanbic Uganda are already implementing Nicholas's advice.
“The bank is laying the groundwork for a structured AI rollout that aligns with governance, infrastructure and long-term business value,” says Rita.
However, as CIOs during the CITO Tanzania launch agreed, digital transformation can not be powered by investment at the company level alone. There needs to be support from the broader policy environment.
