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5 Ways to Avoid Your Digital Transformation Journey Ending in Disaster

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Opeyemi Olaniran, business group director, Cloud & Enterprise, Microsoft Nigeria writes on Five ways to avoid your digital transformation journey ending in disaster

Going on a road trip with family and friends can be amazing. While it might have the potential to end in disaster if not thought through, with a little help from technology, planning and leadership you can expect a great adventure. And it’s the same when it comes to digitally transforming your company.

Your bags are packed, the kids are armed with tablets pre-loaded with movies and games, your GPS is charged, and you’ve packed your coffee-cup power inverter, portable satellite antennae, speed-trap detector, and made a checklist of your stops using mapping software.

In the digital-era you wouldn’t think twice about using technology to make your road trip a success. So why would you treat your business any differently?

Today there are only two types of organisations; the disrupter and the disrupted.

The disrupters were born in the digital age and include Airbnb, Uber and LinkedIn. The disrupted are those that are trying to keep up.

Disrupters do not rely on physical assets, but rather technology. You could think of them as young road trippers with nothing but a backpack and a phone, which is all they need to conquer the world.

Uber for example relies on cars but does not own them, instead it owns the technology. Meanwhile, the disrupted are weighed down by physical assets and human capital that does not scale easily. For example a family travelling in a big bulky caravan will be limited in terms of where they can go.

However, digitally transforming does not mean you have to dump all your assets. A few changes can make all the difference, like connecting a solar panel to the roof of your caravan to supply hot water no matter where you are.

Here are 5 ways we can apply road tripping lessons to our business.

Build A Solid Roadmap
A successful road trip means avoiding obstacles like traffic and roadworks. This requires a plotted route, advanced warning of where the threats are, and good leadership. It’s hard to convince your family that you’re missing the turn-off to the theme park unless you have informed data proving that there’s a roadblock there.

It’s the same in your organisation. You need a roadmap for digital transformation, and data to inform your decisions.

Leadership is key, and 23% of the largest 300 companies in the world have at least one digital director. But digital transformation should not stem from one digital officer, and it should not be viewed as a back-office function for achieving efficiencies. It must become a culture that flows from top managers to all levels of the organisation, not just the IT department.

Change It Up
The world is changing. Ten years ago you would never have dreamed of staying in a stranger’s house on a road trip. But disrupters like Airbnb have changed consumer habits. The disrupted now need to adapt to fulfilling customers’ changing needs.

Just as when choosing accommodation, you do your research to ensure you don’t wind up somewhere far from what you expected, enterprises must use data-driven insights to know exactly what their customers want.

For example, Virgin Atlantic, which partnered with Windows 10 to create “Ida”, an interactive digital adventure app, allowing customers to take an immersive tour of the ‘Upper Class’ experience, through a tablet powered by a virtual reality headset. This was in response to data that showed a lack of interaction between sales staff and business customers.

Intelligence plays a critical role in understanding massive amounts of data about customer behaviour to recognise patterns of sentiment.

Take Risks
Some of the best road trips are those that take risks – going somewhere completely new and unchartered.

Companies that want to compete against start-ups need to behave like start-ups, taking risks and embracing failure.

In the Middle East and Africa, a burgeoning innovation culture means that disrupters are used to doing this.

While more established businesses are often held back by old technology infrastructures because they were never digital from the start. A skills shortage can also be attributed to slow digital transformation, with 70% of companies saying they lack the required ICT skills to adapt.

Employees
On any road trip, your passengers are not going to be happy if your car breaks down, or the GPS fails and you get lost, or the aircon doesn’t work.

Companies that don’t shift to the newest way of doing things are likely to lose staff. Employees, particularly millennials, want companies that offer the best digital opportunities, and businesses will have to up their game to retain and attract them. In turn, young talent will spur innovation and help change the culture of the organisation.

Employees can also be empowered by using intelligence to learn how everyone in the company uses their time and help maximise the impact of the workforce.

Dual Role of The IT Department
If you’re the leader of your road trip, you’re also the navigator, motivator, mechanic and technology expert. The best drivers have many roles and rely on tech to accomplish these.

In an organisation, technology should similarly be part of each business function. At Microsoft, our own IT system plays dual roles within the company.

It helps the company digitally transform while managing applications, infrastructure and security, and serves the role of customer advocate by testing new products and providing feedback. Our leaders continue to raise expectations around the role that IT can play by aligning digital services into 15 cross-company service offerings.

These types of results aren’t discovered by simply spending more on IT. Executives should be integrating IT into their departments, creating a singular roadmap with mutually supportive objectives.

 

 


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Nigeria CommunicationsWeek believes that technology makes life more exciting and helps improve the lives of people around Nigeria and indeed the world. So since 2007, we have devoted our energy to independent reportage of technology and how they affect lives.

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NIMC Says NIN Services Back Online

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National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has announced the restoration of its National Identification Number (NIN) verification services nationwide.

NIMC Says NIN Services Back Online

This, according to the commission, follows the completion of a system maintenance exercise.

In a statement issued on Friday, the NIMC confirmed that all previously disrupted services have resumed.

“NIMC wishes to inform the general public that the recent technical maintenance has been completed and all services have been restored,” the statement read.

The NIMC urged Nigerians seeking to enroll for NIN to visit the its official website to locate the nearest enrollment centers.

The agency also encouraged individuals to make use of its self-service portal for tasks such as data modification, including name changes.

To further ease the verification process, the Commission recommended downloading the NIMC NameAuth app (oath.app) from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store for quick and secure NIN authentication.

NIMC expressed appreciation for the public’s patience during the service disruption, which had impacted banks, telecom providers, and government agencies that rely on NIN verification for their operations.

 


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Report Reveals African Organizations Dangerously Overestimating Cyber defences

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Many businesses are overestimating their defence against cyber attacks, which creates a significant human risk blind spot. A new KnowBe4 report exposes a worrying disconnect between what leaders think about their cyber security readiness and what employees experience.

According to the KnowBe4 Africa Human Risk Management Report 2025, based on insights from cyber security decision-makers across 30 African countries, despite high awareness, a critical gap exists in turning that awareness into actual readiness and resilient behaviour.

Key findings from the KnowBe4 Africa Human Risk Management Report 2025:

Confidence vs awareness: While cyber security awareness is high, leaders express uncertainty about their workforce’s ability to act on that awareness. Many feel employees may overestimate their capabilities in recognising, reporting and mitigating threats.

The need for adaptive and personalised security awareness training: Many companies fail to personalise security awareness training to specific roles or risk exposures.

Widespread BYOD usage: A large percentage of employees (between 41% and 80%) use their personal devices for work.

AI policy development is lagging: Many companies (46%) are still in the process of developing policies for using AI tools in the workplace.

Regional variation: Southern Africa trains more, East Africa governs AI better and West/Central Africa sees the most human-related security incidents.

This gap is significant because Africa has become an attractive target to cyber criminals, especially those that launch AI-powered attacks. A LexisNexis Risk Solutions study found 60% of South African organisations have seen an increase in AI-facilitated financial crime – above the 56% global average.

Kehinde Popoola, regional manager and key representative for West and East Africa at Rubrik, said digital transformation is gaining momentum in Africa and companies are more exposed to cyber risk. The Rubrik executive adds that amid an increase in threats, it is crucial that organisations adopt an assumed breach mindset.

The KnowBe4 research shows that cyber security preparedness and the actual structures required to support secure behaviour seem misaligned.

The report highlights that just 10% of cyber security leaders are fully confident that staff would report a phishing attack or other cyber threat, despite rating employee security awareness of cyber threats at four out of five or higher.

There is also a significant perception gap between decision-makers and general employees in Africa regarding security awareness training, with 68% of leaders believing that training is tailored to roles, compared to only a third of employees feeling adequately trained.

KnowBe4 asserts that many organisations only conduct annual or biannual training that is too generic to effectively change behaviour, contributing to uncertainty about its effectiveness.

According to another report, the KnowBe4 African Cybersecurity and Awareness Report 2025, which focuses on end-user based responses, only 43% of African respondents felt confident in their ability to recognise a cyber threat, and just one in three believed their security awareness training was adequately tailored to their role. This comparison suggests the development of a dangerous perception gap in many organisations.

“There’s a disconnect here – between what leaders think is happening and what employees are actually experiencing,” says Anna Collard, SVP content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa. “The data shows that without procedural and cultural follow-through, awareness simply doesn’t translate into readiness.”

“The continent’s cyber security posture may be more confident than it is truly resilient,” Collard adds.

 


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Domain of Deception as Attackers Deploy Spyware Under Guise of Legal Threats

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Kaspersky has detected a rapidly escalating malicious campaign that has targeted over 1,100 corporate users since June 2025. The attackers pose as a legal firm and in their emails threaten recipients with lawsuits over alleged domain name patent violations, aiming to deploy malware.

Victims who opened and launched the attached files – that mimicked legal documents – had a Trojan installed on their devices, and the attackers could spy on the content of their screens. Organisations across healthcare, finance, and education sectors have been targeted.

The campaign began with 95 emails on June 11 and has since continued to escalate. Apart from claiming that the recipient’s domain name violates patented combinations of a major brand and threatening litigation, in the email the fake legal bureau also expresses the patent holders’ interest in acquiring the domain and offers getting acquainted with the details of the alleged violations by opening the attached archive with “documents”.

It is worth noting that the attackers, likely to avoid detection, attach an archive that is not password protected, and inside it includes another archive that is password protected and a file containing the password along with it.

After the user entered the archive password and clicked on the alleged legal document inside, a Trojan was installed on the device. The user saw a message displayed that read, “This document cannot be opened on this device. Try opening it on another windows device,” and simultaneously the Tor Browser was covertly downloaded and installed in the background.

Through it, the malware regularly sent snapshots of the user’s screen to the attackers over the Tor network. The malware also autostarts whenever the computer is restarted.

“This campaign is a sophisticated blend of psychological manipulation and technical deception, leveraging fear of legal action to coerce businesses into executing harmful files hidden in attached archives. Its rapid growth since June 11 underscores the urgency for organisations to bolster defenses.

Victims face the risk of losing their private data. Robust email security, employee training, and swift incident reporting are essential to counter this evolving threat,” comments Anna Lazaricheva, spam analyst at Kaspersky.

 


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