Yele Okeremi is the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Precise Financial System and President of ISPON
The challenges are both internal and external. Internal, we have looked at ourselves. I am the President of Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria and I say to my respected colleagues in the industry that sometimes when attending meetings, our competencies are being challenged, sometimes, we say we can deliver and they tell you, “You don’t have the capacity.” This is true at times. There is no capacity to do certain kinds of work and for us, as practitioners, we need to up our game.
I’m not saying those applications are not good. But they are substandard to the challenge locally. That affects us because they are built for other societies and they are brought to fix a local need. So, two things can happen. To tackle corruption, bring transparency to the system by creating a system of truth that is open to everyone and remove discretion by automation. That’s the work of the CIO. With a national strategy, the CIO can tell the nation what the road map will be for the next five years and we will begin to tune up for it.PFS is pioneering so many things. We are known for a few products. When you say PFS, it is known for reconciliation.
You think it’s a competitive advantage. Rather than hiding it, we believe a candle does not lose anything by lighting others. That is a very interesting question. It is also very superfluous to become a trillion dollar company. Some of the big companies that we see today, like Microsoft and Oracle started as local products in their countries. No company has become global without first being local. It is because the environment allows them to thrive. The environment promotes and feeds them, and then they become big.