As a lifelong technophile, Thabiso has been in love with computers since a young age. He has taken that passion and turned it into a 15-year corporate career which sees him now leading the tech division of one of the country's largest insurers.
In this interview, he talks to BW TechZone about the state of tech in Botswana, what his current role entails, some tech trends to look out for, or some advice for young people looking to pursue a tech career.
What stoked your interest in technology?
There's a famous saying by Zig Ziglar, who says “Success is when opportunity meets preparation.” From the concept of preparation specifically, I'd say I have been prepping since youth. I remember I started back in the day with getting my first whiff of technology through gaming. We used to have these very fun gaming consoles. We started with the ones we used to buy from the Chinese shops, and then we worked our way up to, like PS1s. I think that's where my love for computers ultimately started. It was fun because it was a game, so I developed a head for it then. But then from curiosity, when I had finished my Junior School, my mother got me a PC to celebrate my passing. I was initially a terrible student, so when I passed it was worthy of a computer being bought in the home.
Getting the computer just furthered my passion. From then on, I was aligned with what I wanted to do. When we got to senior school, we started computer studies, as it was called back then. I enrolled, and then when I got to varsity, I did computer science. From then on, because of the computer science programme at the University of Botswana, I realised how much opportunity there was in the tech career path. I dabbled in every single thing to figure out what would stoke my interest more and in doing so, I realised that I enjoyed a lot of different parts of the work involved in computer science.
I didn't want to be limited to anything so I invested a lot of my time into understanding the different facets of the programme. That helped propel me when I started working because I had allowed myself to experience and not limit myself to any one thing. So in short, what initially stoked my interest in tech was gaming as a youth and then it just snowballed from there as more opportunities kept coming.
You have been in the industry for around 15 years now. What would you say has changed about tech in Botswana between then and now?
Quite a lot. The first thing would be that there's more increase in specialisation. IT used to largely be thought of as infrastructure. So networking guys was what flooded the market. But you don't find that as much anymore. You do find other specialisations, some of which are on the border of IT. Where somebody is doing IT, but with something else. That’s why universities even caught up to having programmes like IT and finance. Because there's an understanding that as technology continues to evolve, we're going to get to a point where it will no longer be sufficient to just be strictly and purely an IT person.
The other is a move from infrastructure support, like I just said, to a more business partner-oriented role. What used to happen was IT people were thought of as the people who would place the servers so that businesses could use the servers and respond whenever there was a call to support. But you have, over the years, seen a situation where businesses are using IT to have a competitive advantage. How you sell, and how you get customers is evolving because of IT. You can see that in other countries where the most successful entrepreneurs and companies are IT-related.
Additionally, in the last 5-6 years, because of COVID and other things that were happening, there was quite an influx of technologies from the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Everything from Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and IoT. Those technologies have been put into the forefront in Botswana and surrounding countries in Africa, and the world while previously, when I started anyway, these were things that were thought of as distant. We now speak of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but in certain boardrooms, people are speaking of the Fifth Industrial Revolution. So you can see that there is quite a rapid evolution in terms of this transformation and what’s happening in the country.
Another change that's happened is an increase in IT risks. So, whilst we used to speak of malware and viruses, we are now very awake to the fact that a ransomware attack could hit an organisation and completely ruin everything. Botswana, like any other country in Africa, is also open to the very same threats that are coming from bad actors. This has happened as a consequence of us also evolving in the technological landscape and creating a signal to those people that we are also worth taking a look at, and they're also attacking Botswana as a result.
In your opinion, how do you think Botswana can leverage technology to unlock its development ambitions?
I think there are a number of things that Botswana can do. The first is we need to further our connectivity goals. We've already started to say we need to ensure that there is connectivity in both rural and urban areas. I think this is important, and a great avenue that we've started is because it creates opportunity for everything else that I'm going to say.
First and foremost, we need our education to catch up to what we're trying to do. Essentially, a way for Botswana to leverage technology to unlock our goals as a country is to have the manpower that will be able to sustain these goals. So we need to infuse technology awareness from a very young age, to where, as a student perhaps, if I am technologically inclined, I don't then need to wait until potentially senior secondary school or varsity in most instances, to focus and zero in on computer science or IT engineering or any of these fields. I should be able to, like in certain countries, start early. To have focus, and to have programmes that deal with students who want to do that. So, I think that that would be first and foremost.
I think at a higher level, we need data-driven policymaking. We need to start using more data analytics to drive how we make decisions both at the bottom level in companies and as a country. If we're going to start a policy that does XYZ, it needs to be based on facts. We need to ensure that we support a centralised and well-resourced innovation hub whose core mandate, among others, will be to look into supporting startups. As a country, we have long stated that we wanted to reduce reliance on the public sector. And the way we're going to do that, in my view, is through start-ups. We need Batswana to start seeing that there is potential in the area for them to start investing time and resources into actually trying to start up their own business in the tech field and so forth.
We need to improve our cybersecurity and data awareness. With the coming into effect of the Data Protection Act it will now become mandatory for companies to reveal whenever a cyber threat materialises into an actual disaster to a company. So we will see them starting to report and I think that is going to potentially shed light on what I believe was previously hidden, which is how many times we get attacked as a country. And I think that will also push for the government to start an awareness campaign for the public to make them alert as to what is happening. And I think people will be safer for it. We obviously wouldn't want companies to be attacked and all these things, but I think ultimately the Data Protection Act coming into effect will be a great thing.
We need to support tech and research. I think it would be great to have a situation where we have a ministry that’s potentially just only looking at how to advance Botswana through Artificial Intelligence, ideally through Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies. What can we do? How can we excel? That sort of thing. With tangible goals and targets that need to be met, and things that can be measured. To say, OK let's take one Fourth Industrial Revolution technology like AI, what can actually be done that is tangible by the country? And I think to extend this thought, another thing that we would also need to focus on in technology is what we’re good at.
We’re good at agriculture, for example. So we need to have such things as agricultural market platforms. We’re also good at tourism, we need to have smart tourism to bring in more investors. There is quite a lot in the area of looking at what we’re good at and ensuring we extend and extenuate that. Then there are areas that we are poor at, like our slow turnaround times in the public sector. So we need to employ these technologies to see how we can better that. Already you are aware that we do have e-government services that are running, but we need to infuse the Fourth Industrial Revolution into them. This has long been done decades ago in certain countries, and nothing stops Botswana from doing the same.
Technology can also help us manage costs as a country. Innovations like smart grids that use technology to manage our electricity and water usage can go a long way in doing this.
Coming to your current role, you are CTO at Botswana Insurance Company. What does a typical day look like in your position?
A typical day works in this way. Regardless of the day, even when I'm not at work, I always have three gears playing in my head that need to constantly be moving, feeding each other and feeding off of each other.
The first is customer experience. From the customer experience pillar, the focus would be, OK I have systems here, how do I expose them to customers at the customer’s preferred touchpoints in a way that is seamless, user-friendly, and that will give them joy? We do that through portals, websites, things like that. So that’s customer experience. We have two sets of customers. We have internal customers, as the IT department. Then we have external customers that are the consumers of our products.
Then we have the operational efficiency pillar, which looks at our internal customers. And the question there is, OK there will be an influx of data coming in and our customers will be engaging with internal staff, so how do I create both those relationships and how do I make them very pleasurable? Also, how do I automate internally? How do I make the processes that we have as a business that are internal, seamless and easy? And how do I ensure that data is flowing in a way that is effective and efficient? We do this through any number of ways. We have bots that we deploy, we create platforms that we develop internally to solution for whatever the business needs.
Then of course we have the governance pillar, which is the third, and perhaps the most important in a sense, because the governance pillar will be looking at such things as the infrastructure in its entirety. It will look at cybersecurity. It will also look at IT risk. Basically, this pillar largely works to show that the lights are on. So at the start of the day, I have to ask myself, how are these pillars doing? What is the health of these pillars? If one pillar is lagging for any reason, let's say for example, there is an increase in the number of customer complaints, that means one of these pillars is not working properly.
It's likely the customer experience pillar is facing problems directly itself, or because of the operational efficiency pillar, the governance pillar is facing a problem. Any number of these three. Or the infrastructure is slower and so that’s ending up translating to customers experiencing slow turnaround times and being unhappy. So because business is now running off the concept of the customer first – a centralised customer experience – it then becomes incumbent upon IT to ensure seamless transactions and smooth transactions.
My team is already aware that these are the things that we are operating on so whilst it's important to, at a higher level, to ensure that all of our strategic initiatives are aligned to the business goals, ultimately this is where we start. Furthering this then is an issue of, how can we make life better. So BIC’s motto is “How can we make life better?” These are the things that we've chosen to say, and this is how will be making everyone around’s lives better. To the team we would usually then have a meeting or sidebar to address problems like that. The last portion of my day is around how to make life better for internal stakeholders and external stakeholders.
What challenges have you and your team encountered in deploying technology solutions and how did you traverse those problems?
I think the problems we have faced have been around solutioning. We're not a large team. I like to think of my team as the weaver of dreams. Unfortunately, you’re not going to be weaving your own dream, but you're weaving the dreams of other participants and other stakeholders. And so a lot of it gets lost in translation. Initially, what used to happen is when we were setting up solutions, especially for internal development of systems and applications, we would develop them based on what is called the waterfall model in project management.
What happens there is I sit you down, and I get your requirements. “What do you want now?” “I want a system that does XYZ.” “OK, remember that you said that”, then I go and develop. After I'm done, I come to you and say, “I'm handing over the system that has XY&Z, like you said.”
But you'll find that for a number of reasons, the project fails. This might be because initially there was not an understanding of the technology you are trying to employ, or not understanding their processes as well as they may have thought, or they not understanding how their processes are connected to other processes, any number of things. There are a lot of research papers that have been done in Botswana, and in fact, as part of my thesis, I ran into a lot of them, around the percentage failure of projects in Botswana. It’s quite high. IT is no exception. So that's the problem that we faced initially when I got in.
How we find our way through the problem is moving away from the waterfall model almost in its entirety and focusing more on project methodology that allows for prototyping. So we now have a lot more engagement. I sit you down, and I ask you, “What system do you want?”, as an example. You will reach out and say “I want system XYZ.” We will sit down and map out what you want. We go develop, we design, we come back to you. “Is this how you would want the system to work?” You say, “Yes, but maybe change this or that.” So we would circle as much as is necessary to have a design framework for this system you want that is 99% or 100% close to what you were dreaming of. Thereafter, we will then go and develop it, and thereafter only give it to you. So that cyclic process of more engagements and more prototyping is how we have come to resolve a lot of the problems.
What steps are you taking to ensure that your technology infrastructure remains future-proof?
The way you ask the question is very contentious [chuckle]. The model right now from the BIC standpoint is we have a push for cloud computing. That's really ultimately because in terms of storage and in terms of computing power, there are finite resources for what you can do with a local data centre. So what we do to not limit ourselves is we employ cloud computing because there we’re able to scale better, and we're also able to get resources on demand.
The reason why I was saying It’s a bit contentious is because when you say “future-proof” it begs the question, “in what way?” and I've only answered as far as scalability is concerned, to say, the use of resources. But there are such things as futureproofing in terms of cyberattacks, just to give an example that we spoke to.
What we've done there is, for our data centre that's localised, we have upgraded it to embed cyber security elements at the infrastructure level, so at the very minute storage level, right? And then build further elements of cyber security up from there. We have an environment that is built upon a zero-trust infrastructure, so there are many other steps that we've taken there. That’s me responding from a cybersecurity admin standpoint. So you can look at it, I believe, from a resources perspective, from a cybersecurity perspective, but you can also look at futureproofing through ensuring that you hire in terms of the employees you're getting in, or the employees that you have, also.
That you are empowering them with opportunities to improve themselves, and trying to keep up with what's out there. And that can only be done through ensuring that they are improving themselves in the latest programmes in the world and then in that we do have their competitive everywhere. So I think that's important because with these 3 levels, you are essentially, to some extent, future-proofing with your technology and your ability to innovate.
What role do you think a collaboration between private and public sectors can play in advancing the industry?
I'll give you a few examples. Where I've seen it being done very well is the banks, maybe perhaps because that's my experience. But, the public sector in Botswana has done a very good job around regulating the private sector, and I’m speaking specifically from my standpoint of the Bank of Botswana doing it. I think they've been doing it very well. That's one way.
The other way could be to collaborate where the public sector is strong, versus whether private is strong. The private sector's main mandate and focus is largely in ensuring that they gain a competitive edge, and they make the most money in the most effective and cost-saving way. Whilst they are doing that, they need brakes. There is this analogy that says the only reason that a driver can drive very fast is because they know that there are brakes they can rely on. So, we need to create a synergy between the private and public sectors that allows the private sector to soar without worries because they know there are eyes on them and that will ensure that they don't derail.
And then, from the public sector, remember now, I'll give an example with the Data Protection Act. Yes, we have indeed come up with legislation around data protection, but, you will find that for the most part, in the public sector the area of regulation and ensuring compliance is always playing a catch-up game. We can employ the expertise of the private sector, to bridge that gap. Who knows better about artificial intelligence as an example, than the people who have to use it for their daily bread? So, we need to have that synergy and that symbiotic relationship where we are helping each other.
And I think that requires a lot of conversation, sitting around the table and figuring out initiatives as to how this will be done. It will be industry specific in my opinion, it will not be a blanket approach or solution. To where if it is banking, the banks need to sit down and say, “These are the problems that we are facing,” and the central bank needs to do the same. And then potentially a committee could sit down and get this done. I think we need to not necessarily blur the lines, but we need to remove a lot of the red tape and ensure that there is actually a cohesive relationship that encourages conducive growth on both ends.
What are the key technological trends that you see shaping the insurance industry in the next 5 to 10 years?
The trends are not going to deviate much from what we're seeing across any other industry, especially looking at the fourth industrial revolution technologies and bedding them down. So, the fifth industrial revolution essentially says we're going to place the human at the centre of digital transformation. But save for that, whether it is the 4th or the 5th, I am seeing Botswana drive towards where other countries have already gotten to. There is a solution called Lemonade, it is an app. It can produce a policy for a client in a few seconds. It uses artificial intelligence, it uses big data, it uses quite a lot of these fourth industrial revolution technologies to be able to review a risk that you are bringing to it, and be able to produce a note for you.
So, what I foresee happening is a situation where, for instance, we start giving a lot of ourselves as customers to social media. And all of these different platforms where, for instance, your driving patterns, your health statistics and things like that, may be easily collected from them. Of course, this is only if the Data Protection Act allows. However I foresee a situation where how data is collected from clients is going to evolve, allowing for more expedient computation and production of cover notes. So, what we're going to see is a lot more portals across the industry. So ultimately, maybe in the next 4-5 years all of the major players in the area of insurance, I foresee a situation where we will be able to get cover from the comfort of your home, without engaging with any human being potentially.
I foresee a situation where we will also better be able to manage fraud because now there is artificial intelligence imbued in the software solutions that are being deployed. And I think from the area of claims, I think BIC, for example, has done very well in its response times and its turnaround times when it comes to claims. But I foresee a situation where we're going to move from good to great, potentially in maybe two to three years where even from the claims perspective, across potentially all of the different competitors, you are going to find the situation where you can claim easier and from the comfort of your home.
So a large portion of these things are driving to a situation where the push is for the comfort of your own home 24/7 type philosophies. Why? Because in your current stance as a client, you have a lot more artificial intelligence on your phone than a company has in its data centre. And so without even realising it, you are used to these technologies. So when you encounter and have a touch point with a company, it's incumbent upon the company to ensure that they leverage the technologies to meet you where you are comfortable. So that's why I'm saying in four to five years you’re going to find that the leading insurance company is one whose digital transformation would have traversed further enough to meet you where you are comfortable, the comfort of your phone.
What recent innovations are you most excited about within your sector?
To be frank, the innovations that I am most comfortable with in the insurance space are ones that I have been involved with because currently, Botswana Insurance Company is leading in the area of digital transformation. Really, it's the leading short-term insurance company even beyond technology-wise. So we have pretty much-done everything, we have elements of AI around managing fraud, and we have RPA, which is robotic process automation. So we have robots working around the clock.
We have different portals pushing different capabilities to customers. We have telematics, so we monitor your cars as they're moving about, with your permission of course, to manage driver behaviours and patterns, so that we can better give the customers experiences in terms of the insurance covers we give them, the claim experience and things like that. So, these are but some of the technologies that we have deployed that I'm very proud of. We also have been developing internal platforms that we use, so we're very platform intensive here so we don't purely purchase off-the-shelf systems, we also develop internally. So I hope I've answered your question, it's just a very passionate topic.
What advice could you give to a young person looking to pursue a career in the technology area?
I think it ultimately depends on what level the person is that is hearing my advice. I genuinely believe that where IT is currently, it is where you can be successful as an IT person, especially if your focus isn't purely limited to IT. I'll give you an example. In part, Elon Musk has been a success because he had experience in physics which translated to the way he thought and the solutions that he was able to provide to the world. If you look at Mark Zuckerberg, his successes were not limited purely to just IT. You will find that either he or some part of his team invested some time into psychology and that's why Meta has become the success that it is, and why some are addicted to it, you see? I think it's important for an IT person, who's already in the industry, to understand that it is beneficial to push the envelope and go beyond strictly just IT. That investing in other areas will ultimately feed into you becoming even better.
For somebody who is outside of IT and wants to take the leap and the jump, I think it's important to understand that beyond me simply saying we welcome you, but to say you need to figure out which career path in IT strongly links to what you currently do in a way that you can make full use of your skills with the technology. So, then you have people who are about to make the decision, for example, students who have just finished Form 5 and are considering potentially taking a computer science or an engineering course that has to do with or that is related to IT. To them I would say, are you passionate about it? You see, with IT, really ultimately, in almost all facets of IT, there needs to be an understanding that it's a lot of quiet nights where you are by yourself solving problems. So if in your heart of hearts, you are somebody who enjoys solving problems then IT could potentially be for you. It's not always easy, but if it’s something that you’re passionate about, it can give life meaning. It can give you a purpose. You need, however, to research to find out all of the facets of IT, and there’s quite a lot before you can take the dive.
Then I would say there would be people who have completed, let's say, computer science or some engineering course that has to do with IT. In that instance, ultimately, what is important is to figure out, “what is close to what I do?”, and then start building out your portfolio. What I would caution against, and this is my opinion, is IT is changing so drastically that potentially if your focus is only in one area, my concern is if AI comes in and consumes that area, you need to ensure that you are still practically someone who can give value to an organisation or the country.
And for me, I thought through that and my solution to that is potentially looking at not being limited to any one speciality, but being able to work collaboratively with whatever technology will come to create solutions and create value. So, beyond that, if we take it a further step back, much like I responded earlier to one of your questions, if we're talking as a country, we need to get to a point where we invest more into our diamonds. And I say this because we can change our economy by leaps and bounds if technology is at the centre.
For the longest time diamonds have been at the centre but from our homes growing up, we always knew that agriculture was central in Botswana. So, we need to have a similar type of culture as a country where IT now becomes central and becomes part of the Mecca where we invest in some children, depending on patterns and values, starting computer science early, starting programs early. To where we can compete on the global stage.