The Founder and Group Managing Director of Computer Warehouse Group, Austin Okere, has described experience, innovation and intuition as keys to business growth and development. Speaking to journalists in Lagos on the successes and achievements of his company in the West African region, Okere said his company is passionate about innovation.
He said: “At CWG, innovation is our passion, and it has, among other strategies, kept us in business.” In order to achieve growth, he said a business must learn through experience, innovation and intuition.
“Intuition is basically what you cannot explain when you are at the right place at the right time. Innovation is also important because everything works for a while, and thereafter, things could change. Before now, everywhere in Lagos was full of cyber cafés, but today they are not there anymore because they did not see the need for innovation,” he said.
He added: “There was a time when there were travel agencies everywhere. Now you can book your flights directly on the Internet. To remain in business, travel agencies need to innovate.”
To remain relevant in the industry, he said the company had to evolve and come up with a CWG 2.0 platform.
He said: “CWG started as a Dell PC supplier and supporter but today, everybody can buy Dell PCs and maintain them. So, we now went into what we call ‘Enterprise System’, which is big data for banks. Even today, everybody can do that as well. The next step we took as a company was to go into managed services, where, as I talk to you, we have over 100 people that resume and close at MTN work places as if they are MTN staff, but they are employees of CWG, handling Managed Services for MTN.
“They supervise all our clients’ Information Technology (IT) facilities. They are the ones that enable all the calls we make as telecoms subscribers to work. They work in the data centres and today, we are taking some steps forward by discussing cloud computing, putting software as enterprise solution to use. That becomes the purpose but the issue is in helping to reduce IT expenditure for businesses, in order to better the lots of entrepreneurs.”
