EDITOR’ S NOTE
Greetings to the readers of Intelligent CIO Africa. Digital innovation across Africa was recognised and celebrated during Lynchpin Media’ s prestigious ICT awards event in Johannesburg. The Intelligent ICT Awards Africa took place at Katy’ s Palace Bar on May 8 and showcased IT success stories from across the continent, recognising the region’ s leading technology change-makers, vendors, and channel partners. This also coincided with the 100 th monthly edition of Intelligent CIO Africa.
The awards, sponsored by Dell Technologies, Cloud on Demand and Westcon-Comstor, featured six categories that celebrate the achievements of IT and business executives, while the event was hosted by Musa Khuzwayo. Award winners were selected by a jury panel, made up of David Reynders, CTO, Merchant Capital; Sithembile Songo, CISO, Eskom; Wabo Majavu, Non-Executive Director and Founder, WiTechnology; and Noluvuyo Gqadu, CEO at CodeNgwana.
Completed details of the award winners and pictures are available in the following pages, in our special cover feature for this month.
In this month’ s Talking Business section, Charlene Smith at Insight Consulting explains why African enterprises should not look at AI as a magical tool. She advises them to follow a business approach towards implementing AI in an enterprise.
In the rush to implement AI, businesses must ask, what problems do I need to solve, what efficiencies do I need to gain, how can I deploy this tool. This is a continuous evolution and not a one-time implementation. You need to continuously identify areas to improve in the business, and then adapt AI solutions as business needs evolve and change.
In many ways, it is about building an organisational culture of constantly building and adapting says Smith.
And in our CIO Opinion section, Dean Baker at Infobip, points out that African enterprises need to get two parameters correct while adopting public cloud platforms. One is estimating the real total cost of their operations in the cloud, and the other is to become fully data complaint based on the data regulations of their country and industry.
Turn these pages to read more about the digital transformation that is taking place across Africa.
In this month’ s Editor’ s Question, executives from Armata Cyber Security, DMP SA, Vertiv, and Commvault, share their answers on some of the best practices around data management and data centres for African enterprises, as they begin to adopt Generative AI and Machine Learning through pilot projects and proof of concepts.
Wishing you the best of business success in the month ahead.
Arun Shankar Managing Editor arun @ lynchpinmedia. com
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