This is a sponsored piece from me. We would like to work for you, as you engineer strategies for 2018. Have a profitable New Year, good people.

I lead an Advisory Services Practice in Fasmicro Group.  We help clients architect winning strategies through new business models, technologies and processes. We provide deep insights to clients’ business challenges, uncovering patterns, and delivering outcomes that win in markets. Our clients include leading banks, telcos, fintechs, militaries, governments, insurers, and more.

Gain clarity on your strategy with an impactful on-site workshop, expertly driven by me

The centerpiece of our work is to structure how technology will help clients to accelerate innovation and growth. We work to deliver technology which goes beyond running an organization to one that actually transforms a firm. As we do this, we stay focused on the corporate goal, making sure that technology is anchoring the realization of business objectives.

Our work covers change, leadership, and strategy. We serve clients in these areas, among others:

• Board/Executive Management IT Roadmap presentation (industry landscape tailored for your firm/industry, delivering what to prepare for in short-, mid- and long-terms)
• IT Skill Capabilities Mapping
• Digital Products (business model, strategy, growth)
• Quarterly Report (max of 8 pages, summarizing key industry evolution, around your business, with how you can prepare)
• IT Governance
• IT Value Realization
• IT Process Documentation
• Center of Excellence (design, development, deployment, evaluation)
• IT Product Conception and Launch (business model, strategy, growth)
• IT Spend Planning
• Data Consolidation

I lead my team and we handle engagements with absolute commitment to quality. Our clients receive the highest level of value, and our pricing is industry-competitive.

Expand your team’s capabilities and invent the future of your business with our unparalleled industry-and vendor-specific expertise

Selected Focus Areas

1. IT Strategy: Conduct a review of the Firm’s current IT strategy, and identify the current gaps considering the business needs  and market best practices  and make recommendations  to implement the strategic gaps with fit for purpose  solutions in line with Global Best practices and local realities
2. IT Governance: Conduct a review of the current IT Governance practices in all areas in line with International and Local Regulatory standards like COBIT and identify the gaps in implementation/Compliance to standards. Recommend the necessary detailed steps to align with the International standards. Review the IT Organogram for HQ and at Country level and recommend an Effective Governance Framework to effectively manage the HQ and Country technology Organizations interface
3. IT Skill Capabilities: Conduct an IT capability and competency mapping of key IT Tasks/roles against available skills in the Firm  and make recommendations where there are shortages or excess capacities. This should be done using acceptable frameworks like Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). Establish how to appropriately deploy the human resources to have an agile IT Organization. Produce a framework that will help the Firm to develop and retain the core IT skills required by the Firm. Recommend a Robust Outsourcing strategy and in key areas to complement inhouse skills and a governance framework to manage the Outsourced Vendors.
4.  IT Value Realisation: Conduct a detailed Benefits Realisation assessment of the Firm’s Key IT investments in Software and Hardware Projects. Make specific recommendations on how to measure Benefit/value realised from IT and identify and recommend the Key Levers for Value Realisation of the Existing IT investments. Develop a framework for the establishment of IT Value realisation practices for future projects and investments.
5. IT Projects: Conduct an assessment of all IT Projects in the Firm during the last three years. Determine how many of them were delivered on time, how many are still ongoing, how many are failed, etc. Identify the Strategic reasons for their failures and recommendation for successful execution of projects. Make recommendations on how to better handle ongoing IT projects and develop an enterprise project management and governance framework for managing the Firm’s IT projects in a cost effective and timely manner.
6. IT Process Documentation and Performance Management: Conduct a review of all IT and Cross Functional process in the Firm against available documentations and make recommendations. Identify the key gaps in the processes leading to failures in IT Operations service delivery. Assist to align the IT processes with specific business processes and produce a report showing the mappings of IT process against business processes. Create Standard templates for the creation of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for IT Processes. Identify the Key Vital Performance Metrics which IT operations should monitor to manage the service delivery and operations of IT.  Identify the Specific and Measurable Key Leading and Lagging Indicators KPIs for all the units in IT organization.
7. IT Processes Documentation:Document the Firm’s IT processes to improve change/succession management, build IT knowledge base and institutionalize the Firm’s processes by making them individually-agnostic.
8.  Center of Excellence: Assist the IT Organization to develop and implement a framework for the development of the Centre of Excellence (CoE) concept within the IT Organisation in the Key Domains consisting of best practices standards in Solution Delivery, Governance, Service Management, Project Management, Data Centre Practices, etc. Develop a CoE Maturity framework.  Assess the current state and identify the gaps and benchmarks required to move towards Journey of Excellence.
9. Digital Products: Review the performance of the technology-enabled products against the uptake and value realized. Review the products/channels to recommend infrastructural and other changes needed to generate desired traffics for the products.
10. IT Spend:  Review the IT spend for last 3 years and provide strategic assessment of the Firm’s IT cost structures compared to global and Local benchmarks. Recommend Value added-IT cost reduction approach that provides a competitive edge to business while reducing overall costs.
11. Data Consolidation: Develop data governance and framework for the Firm to enable efficient management of the Firm’s data and ensure data is robust, accurate and reliable. Design and execute the Firm’s data consolidation plan.
12. Cybersecurity & Digital Forensics: We help institutions develop cybersecurity and digital forensics policy, management and technology solutions
13. Leadership: We help clients architect change leadership with specific focus on technology.

Contact: info@fasmicrogroup.com

When evil people do bad things in America, U.S. law enforcement agencies ask companies like Apple to help them unlock the phones to support their investigations, in occasions where the bad people are dead. Going to the equipment manufacturers is necessary because they are the makers of the products, and can help to unlock the devices, without destroying the data in them.

This is necessary because telecom companies like Verizon and Sprint do not warehouse fingerprint and facial images of American citizens. The best data they have are social security numbers (like Nigeria’s National Identity Number from the National Identity Management Commission) and date of birth with the usual fields (addresses, names, etc).

But in Nigeria, the telcos have everything including facial images, fingerprint and anything you can imagine. So if a dead terrorist’s phone is to be unlocked, Nigerian government can ask the telcos to help. They do not have to crack the phone. That is not necessary since they did not make the phones. They just pull the biometrics to unlock the phones. Every mobile subscriber in Nigeria surrenders biometrics data for the opportunity to be assigned a mobile line.

I think it will be possible to unlock iPhone X via a life-size screen of a stored human face. Also for the Touch ID, one can use a stored fingerprint to do the same, by tricking the iPhone to unlock, using the owner’s biometrics.

American investigators do not have these biometrics data about their citizens. But their Nigerian counterparts do. And when everything fails, it is safe to expect them to take the iPhone X and point to the face of a dead terrorist to unlock it. The same can be done via fingerprint also. Ethics be damned; that is the world we live right now.

I am really concerned on the state of privacy and how it is evolving in Nigeria. Sure, government has been pushing hard due to many bad actors but that does not mean that the nation does not need a national data policy. Having biometrics of citizens in private company vaults is terrifying

In a piece by a South African professor, he challenged the Finance Minister of South Africa, Malusi Gigaba, to look into Nigeria for ideas. Yours truly was mentioned as one of the innovators he can get inspiration as he works to redesign the economy of the nation.

SA’s finance minister is at a crucial crossroads. He can decide to preside over a failing economy, which is dying not only because of state capture by powerful private interests, but also because it hasn’t been able to alter those structural conditions that have made it so dramatically unequal in the first place.

[…]

I would introduce Gigaba to my colleague Ndubuisi Ekekwe, who has developed digital sensors that analyse soil data to help farmers apply the right fertiliser and optimally irrigate their farmlands. Across Nigeria, the process is already improving productivity by using analytics to facilitate data-driven farming practices for small-scale farmers.

I will be traveling to South Africa this Thursday and will be working there for eight days. I like South Africa; it has been nice to my business for years.  My Intel FPGA (formerly Altera) business which my company is one of the two partners to Intel Corp in Continental Africa has gotten 90% of its revenue from South Africa.

Of course, every part of Africa has something we can all learn from one another to develop the continent. Nigeria has more to learn from South Africa especially in education and public health. Our focus should be developing and strengthening institutions in the continent. Mr Minister, hope you got the introduction! Lol.

Meanwhile, pricing-innovation is shaking the world. From Fortune Newsletter.

Reliance Communications, once the biggest mobile operator in India, is skidding towards bankruptcy after Anil Ambani’s business was hollowed out by competition from his own brother at Reliance Jio. The company posted a fourth straight quarterly loss and missed payments on various debentures Monday, including non-convertible ones. RCom’s latest plan to cut debt by selling infrastructure and real estate to Brookfield came to nothing

Reliance Jio has crashed the prices of data in India. This shows that anyone with money can move customers. What has happened in India could be a big lesson in Nigeria: if you can buy 9Mobile and have deep pockets, you can acquire customers because brand loyalty is minimal. People with move for deals. That #1 carrier in India, few years ago, is now possibly going bankrupt tells you the power of having money to wage price wars. But this one is unfortunate: an elder brother’s company is destroying the value of his young brother’s empire.

In the technology space these days, it is safe to note that China has held its grounds very well. When you discuss great technology companies, you are simply talking of Chinese and American companies. India has since been muted. Talk of Tencent, Alibaba, Mobike, and Ant Financial (all Chinese) in the community of Apple, Facebook and others. (Pardon the exaggeration of comparing Apple with anything, but you get the point.) I am not sure any Indian firm comes close. Just look at the numbers reported by Tencent this week.

Chinese Internet giant Tencent reported revenue increased 61% in its most recent quarter, the fastest rate of growth in seven years, to almost $10 billion. Net income at the owner of popular messaging app WeChat jumped 69% to $2.7 billion. WeChat reached 980 million monthly active users, meaning by year-end it will likely surpass the 1 billion mark.

In the world of AI, China is giving America a really great challenge. In payment, I can say that China may even be ahead. WeChat leads the global messaging app. Alibaba has brought many new ideas that Amazon has been copying. It was operating supermarkets years before Amazon bought one.

China is not a den of copy-cats, anymore. The nation’s technology has evolved. Yes, while India has the high-octane mathematicians and technical minds, they are largely employees of American companies. They are paid labor as the world does not have any (new) major tech firm from India at the top level, with the global bravado as we see in Chinese tech firms. Yes, India, through its citizens, is playing a major role in what is happening in U.S., but India as a nation is left out.

Yes, India provides the brainpower that drives most elements of Silicon Valley. For all the accusations of copy-cats against China, you will be biased if you do not see that Facebook Messenger is copying WeChat, Amazon is ripping off Alibaba, and Tencent has built a solution that combines Facebook+Twitter+Instagram+[add more] in one ecosystem.

That calls into question: is there something wrong with British education that makes us excellent engineers, and mathematicians, but sub-par entrepreneurs? India shares British education with Nigeria. What is happening in China today is what I would have expected to be emanating from India because they create these excellent tech minds. But it seems, being great innovators goes beyond being brilliant in calculus.

I close this piece with this quote from Fortune Newsletter:

I had dinner this week with Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, who may have the most comprehensive view of the global technology scene of any living person, having earned a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon and worked at Apple, Microsoft, and Google , before moving back to China and devoting himself to venture investing there. Lee’s specialty is artificial intelligence, and he is quick to acknowledge that the U.S. has the lead in that technology. But he also is firmly convinced that China will quickly catch up, and surpass.

“The copy-cat era is behind us,” he says.

As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, the Chinese change is especially evident in the realm of mobile payments, where Chinese companies have leap-frogged the credit card business and now have 600 million consumers using sophisticated mobile payments systems.

All those payments spew out massive amounts of data, which feed the development of AI. “Data drives AI,” Lee says. While Google clearly leads the global development of AI technology, he believes Tencent—whose WeChat platform is a leader in online payments—is in second place and rising: “China will become a challenger, if not a leader.”

One huge advantage Chinese companies have is a supportive government, at a time when U.S. giants increasingly face regulatory threats. Attacks against the big tech companies in the U.S. and Europe will be “a big advantage for China,” he believes. In an area like autonomous vehicles, China is “two years behind the U.S. companies,” but every regulatory action against those companies “will help China catch up.”

Separately, I was visited yesterday by Christian Hogg, CEO of Hutchinson China Meditech, which is about to win FDA approval for a lung cancer drug that will be the first synthetic drug ever created in China to make it through the U.S. regulatory process. He expects many more to come. And he, too, credits the Chinese government for the strong support it provides to innovative companies. “China is leap-frogging the way industries have developed in the past,” he says. “China is going to catch up very quickly.”

Asked why government involvement doesn’t stifle innovation in China, as they argue it does in the U.S., both Lee and Hogg have similar answers. The Chinese government is clearly focused on encouraging innovation, and takes a relentless trial-and-error approach to ensuring their success.

Yes, China gets help. But I can tell you that if the entrepreneurs are not ready, the help will not translate into anything of value. I give the Chinese entrepreneurs credit, and we need to emulate them across African cities: China is working.