By David Asama Dogeni, Senior Vice President of Technology & Head of the 1879 Tech Hub, UAC of Nigeria PLC
Technology has become part of how modern businesses operate. The more difficult question for business leaders is deciding where it can create meaningful value.
Every year brings new tools, platforms and applications that promise to make businesses faster, more efficient and more competitive. Keeping up with all of them is neither practical nor necessary. What matters is understanding the problems within the business that technology can genuinely help solve, and having a clear way of measuring whether it has made a difference.
That means technology decisions increasingly belong in the wider business conversation.
They affect how work gets done, how decisions are made, how resources are deployed and how quickly an organisation can respond to changing circumstances. Technology teams may lead implementation, but decisions around where and why it is deployed need to remain connected to the priorities of the business.
The most useful place to begin is with the operation itself. Where is time being lost? Where are decisions being made with limited information? Which processes are creating unnecessary costs or delays? Where are people spending valuable time on tasks that could be handled more efficiently? These questions provide a better starting point than choosing a technology and looking for somewhere to use it.
That approach is reflected in how we think about technology at UAC of Nigeria PLC and 1879 Tech Hub. At UAC, SAP S/4HANA, our cloud-based enterprise resource planning system, supports core operations by strengthening controls, improving efficiency and giving teams better visibility across end-to-end processes. As the business evolves, we continue to assess how the platform can meet changing needs.
In 2025, we completed an upgrade and migration that delivered savings in cloud infrastructure costs and following the acquisition of CHI Limited, began preparations to harmonise its ERP platform with the wider Group.
At 1879 Tech Hub, that approach can mean building a solution where a specific business need calls for one, or harnessing existing technologies where they can address the problem effectively.
We have developed tools including Legal Compass for legal operations, SalesUp for route-to-market visibility, Ops Shield for safety and compliance, and Proc360 for procurement.
We also harness technologies such as computer vision and machine learning through Factory AI to give teams greater visibility across the production floor, helping them identify safety violations, quality defects and operational inefficiencies earlier and respond more quickly.
Successful adoption depends on more than the technology itself. Leadership needs to be clear about the business outcome, teams need to understand how a new system affects their work, and the organisation needs the skills and processes to sustain it.
This becomes particularly important as AI and other advanced technologies become more widely used. A highly capable system has limited value if the people expected to use its output cannot understand it or apply it appropriately to the business context.
For organisations beginning their technology journey, this means resisting the pressure to do everything at once. A focused use case, a clear business objective and a way to measure the outcome provide a stronger foundation for scale.
Once a solution has demonstrated value, the business has something tangible to build on, whether that means extending it to another production line, applying the learning to another function or addressing a different problem.
For African businesses, this practical approach carries particular weight. Companies across the continent operate in environments with complex supply chains, diverse consumer markets and varying levels of infrastructure.
The pace of technological change will continue to increase. Business leaders will have to make decisions about AI, automation, data and other emerging technologies while balancing competing priorities and assessing which solutions are genuinely relevant to their businesses.
The opportunity lies in building the discipline to understand the problem first, test technology against it, measure the outcome and use what works to make the next decision. That is how technology moves from being another business investment to becoming a practical driver of better performance.
