John Obaro is the Managing Director/Chief Executive officer of SystemSpecs. He has had a distinguished IT management career and is regarded as one of the most respected personalities in the Nigerian IT industry.
(Managing Director/CEO), SystemSpecs,
1st Vice President
Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria
(ISPON)
A man of high integrity, great ideas and a clear demand for excellence, the early part of his career was spent at Leventis Group of Companies and United Bank of Africa. His last appointment before founding SystemSpecs, was at International Merchant Bank (IMB) then an affiliate of the First National Bank of Chicago, where he led the team that achieved Nigeria’s first installation of an international banking package on a network of 5 cities, at a time when many organisations were paper-based.
Many financial institutions, borrowing from this success, went the same way.
By 1992, John felt he had paid his dues as an employee, he took a plunge to entrepreneurship. That was the beginning of SystemSpecs.
Under his leadership, and with a team of professionals with varied experience, SystemSpecs has attained the enviable position of Nigeria’s leading software house and aspiring to become the de-facto software institution in Africa.
John has a degree in computer Science from the Ahmadu Bello University (1979), and an MBA from the University of Lagos (1981). He’s an alumnus of the prestigious Lagos Business School (LBS) Chief Executive Programme and has extensive international exposures to business management.
Recognised for his leading role in the development of IT and particularly software, John served on subcommittees of the National IT Policy Development Team, the Ministerial Committee for Software Development in Nigeria as well as the CBN Committee on National Payment System Vision 2020.
On invitation, he serves as a patron of the Nigeria Computer Science Students Association (NACOSS) which has presence in over fifty tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
John is a fellow of the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS), member of Computer Professionals (Registration Council) of Nigeria (CPN) – the highest industry practice regulatory body, and is the 1st Vice President of Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON).