Computer News Middle East October 2017

ISSUE 309 | OCTOBER 2017 WWW.TAHAWULTECH.COM

DIFC COURTS CEO MARK BEER OBE EVOLVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FORUM 2017 BLOCKCHAIN: THE STORY SO FAR WHY MILLENNIALS WILL REDEFINE GCC TECH HOW TO BEAT DIGITAL DISRUPTION

JOINING FORCES Mansour Al Ketbi unites tech teams for $125 billion powerhouse Mubadala Investment Company

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Our events

EDITORIAL

On the same page It’s that time of year again. The release of our October issue of course coincides with GITEX Technology Week 2017, one of the most bustling and high-profile events in the Middle East’s technology calendar.

Things are also back in full swing at CNME. We have our eighth annual ICT Achievement Awards on Sunday 8th October at the Conrad Hotel, and our inaugural Evolve Digital Transformation Forum on Tuesday 24th October at Jumeirah Beach Hotel.

More on that on page 26.

In the meantime, I’m delighted that our cover star this month is none other Mansour tells than Mubadala Investment Company’s CNME about chief information officer Mansour the inner Al Ketbi. In an exclusive interview, manoeuvrings Mansour tells CNME about the inner needed to get IPIC manoeuvrings needed to get IPIC and Mubadala Development Company’s and Mubadala IT teams on the same page following Development January’s historic merger, which Company's IT has created one of the UAE’s most teams on the important investment vehicles, with same page. assets of more than $125 billion.

On page 20, meanwhile, you can learn from one of the region’s most prominent legal experts as to why the profession is lagging behind in terms of technology adoption. DIFC Courts CEO Mark Beer OBE gives his take on why justice mechanisms have an obligation to be innovative, user-friendly and globally inclusive, all through the use of IT. On page 34, Glesni Holland explores an inescapable issue for this region – that of its exploding youth population. Glesni looks at the ways that the youth of today will come to impact the technology of tomorrow across the Middle East. Glesni also reports from Huawei’s Connect conference in Shanghai on page 10.

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Contents

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ISSUE 309 | OCTOBER 2017

10

EVENT: HUAWEI CONNECT 2017

14

MUBADALA INVESTMENT COMPANY CIO MANSOUR AL KETBI

30 New kid on the block

48 Data Centre Build 2017

34 Young guns

58 Don't believe the hype

20

FEATURE: DIFC COURTS CEO MARK BEER OBE

Dubai has set out its stall to become a leader in the adoption of blockchain, but when can we expect to see this become a mainstream technology in enterprises across the region?

By 2050, 54 percent of the region's population is expected to be under 36 years of age. How will this growing population of millennials shape the future of technology in the Middle East?

Gartner’s research vice president Alexander Linden on why IT leaders must walk a fine line between embracing and overplaying AI technologies’ role in delivering value for digital business.

38 How to fend off digital disruption 70

26

EVENT: EVOLVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FORUM

Clint Boulton explores what CIOs need to do to commit to an ‘anticipatory IT’ strategy and stave off being a victim of digital transformation.

Now in its fifth year, the Data Centre Build Conference returned to Dubai last month to shed light on the latest trends and best practices impacting modern data centres.

Chai in the sky Why Costa Coffee’s latest ‘drone drop’ initiative delivering cold drinks to beach-goers via drone technology is destined to nosedive in the UAE. Published by

FOUNDER, CPI MEDIA GROUP Dominic De Sousa (1959-2015) EDITORIAL Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9129

PRODUCTION AND DESIGN Production Manager James P Tharian james.tharian@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5673

Editor James Dartnell james.dartnell@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9153

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How to Win Over the Uberbanked Consumer: One Transaction at a Time

NEW TYPE OF CONSUMER THEY WANT

There is a rapidly growing segment of your customer base that is...

• Self-service convenience • Lower costs & better product options • An awesome banking experience

• Tech savvy • Willing to shop around

They are the UBERBANKED! 1.

Used to describe an emerging movement towards taking adv products and services sourced from multiple institutions, peers and alternative providers 2.

A real reason for banks to change their business model

THE UBERBANKED HAVE A HARD TIME WITH COMMITMENT

73%

Would be more excited about a new financial services Square than from their own nationwide bank “The Millenial Disruption Index”, Viacom Media Networks

79%

in 3

Would be open to switching banks in the next 90 days “The Millenial Disruption Index”, Viacom Media Networks

See their banking relationship as merely transactional “2015 North America Consumer Digital Banking Survey” Accenture

HOW CAN YOU MAKE SURE THE UBERBANKED CHOOSE TO BANK WITH YOU?

EVERY TRANSACTION IS AN OPPORTUNITY If the UBERBANKED consumers care about transactions, so should you...

ESTABLISH OPERATIONAL AWARENESS Know when, where and why transactions are failing

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Polycom SoundStation

T

wenty-five years ago, Polycom introduced the instantly recognisable, three-legged conference call centre – the SoundStation.

The triangular device was one of the first products to incorporate “full-duplex” technology into a conference phone, effectively allowing both connected parties to talk simultaneously in an audio meeting scenario, eliminating repetition to provide a more collaborative environment.

The SoundStation could intelligently adapt and steer the pickup pattern of the active talker, using its three directional microphones, while also cutting out room noise and reverberation. It was this basic sound science that crowned this device as the business audio tool of choice during the nineties, as well as becoming the renowned product to embody Polycom’s identity for years to come.

At the end of 1992 – the year the SoundStation was released – Polycom had earned $1.4 million in revenue and had grown as a company from two to 50 employees. But they didn’t stop there.

The original SoundStation was followed by the SoundStation Premier, and later the SoundStation 2. These systems shared the same futuristic look and design, which has continued in the firm’s conference call products to this day.

To celebrate the device’s silver anniversary, Polycom has released a modernised version of its original success story – the Trio 8500. Unlike its predecessors, the Trio 8500 is expected to support video conferencing and content sharing before the year is up.

With the ability to pick up audio from a 4.2-metre radius, the device is well suited to small and medium-sized meeting rooms, with the reach easily extended using optional plug-in microphones.

8

OCTOBER 2017

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ANALYSIS

Huawei Connect 2017

CLEAR SKIES AHEAD Huawei's Connect conference gathered 20,000 IT professionals in Shanghai to showcase a number of solutions that embody the company’s vision to become one of the world’s top cloud players within the next five years. Glesni Holland reports from Shanghai New International Expo Centre.

10

OCTOBER 2017

“

The cloud is a key cornerstone of the intelligent world,” said Huawei’s rotating CEO, Guo Ping, in his opening keynote of Huawei Connect 2017.

The company’s annual flagship event attracted IT professionals, thought leaders and analysts from 150 countries to hone in on the fact that for many organisations, cloud adoption is no longer an option but an imperative. “Because of this, clouds around the globe are beginning to converge – becoming more and more centralised,” added Ping.

He went on to highlight the company’s main goal of becoming one of the five major cloud players in the world within the next 3-5 years. “We’ve got the technology and know-how to do it, but our business model is not to monetise user data,” he said. “We do not develop www.tahawultech.com

applications or touch the data in our public clouds. We provide technologies and services to help users monetise their data.”

Quoting Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, Ping said, “In this era of great opportunities, we refuse to be opportunistic. Huawei has never taken shortcuts and never will, and the same applies to Huawei Cloud.

We’ll keep our feet on the ground and continue to invest and work with partners to build our cloud alliance until we have secured our position as one of the world’s five clouds.”

Zheng Yelai, president of Huawei Cloud, supported reaffirmed Ping’s words, and revealed that alongside Huawei’s addition of roughly 4,500 new features to its cloud suite, the company has seen a 238 percent increase in its user base since March this year. He also highlighted his belief that cloud providers must ensure www.tahawultech.com

In this era of great opportunities, we refuse to be opportunistic. We have never taken shortcuts and never will, and the same applies to Huawei Cloud.

Guo Ping, rotating CEO, Huawei they integrate individual technologies and “apply them together in sophisticated enterprise scenarios” if they are to be the best in the business.

Yelai put the spotlight on the role artificial intelligence will play in this transition. “AI has become a hot topic in Silicon Valley – but OCTOBER 2017

11

ANALYSIS

Huawei Connect 2017

it seems it has also become a household object of sorts within the enterprise,” he said. “If you don’t know how to incorporate it into your business to create value, you are falling behind.”

This signalled the next major announcement of the conference; the launch of the Enterprise Intelligence (EI) cloud platform. “The launch of EI today demonstrates that Huawei has been able to incorporate AI technology with different business scenarios,” Yelai said. He went on to highlight Huawei’s use-cases for the technology, from supply forecasting, to warehousing and signing goods receipts. “By applying EI in this field, we are provided with intelligent packing capabilities as well as a 3D view of each container, improving the efficiency of overall container usage by 6 percent.”

Li Qiang, division chief from the Shenzhen Traffic Police Bureau, shed light on the city’s experience in adopting intelligent methods of urban transportation using the platform. In a city where there are 6,000 kilometres of road and 3.3 million vehicles – 550 vehicles per kilometre – it’s fair to say that Shenzhen faces a serious vehicle density issue. In order to manage this, the city now plans to use Huawei’s dedicated urban network to capture traffic data of up to 700 million entries a month, alongside “EI-assisted” law enforcement – known as the ‘Shenzhen Traffic Brain’ and will capture 10 million images a day.

Smart city initiatives are currently ranking high on Huawei’s priority list – not only in Chinese provinces, but here in the Middle East, too. “We have very good implementation rates for our smart 12

OCTOBER 2017

AI has become a hot topic in Silicon Valley - but it seems it has also become a household object of sorts within the enterprise.

Zheng Yelai, president, Huawei Cloud

city solutions throughout the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with our project in Yanbu, KSA, ranking as one of the largest smart city initiatives we have pursued globally,” said Alaa Elshimy, managing director of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group for the Middle East.

Despite having the manpower and resource capabilities on hand to enable smart city projects to go ahead, Elshimy believes the rest of the GCC is lagging behind the UAE and the Kingdom, which he says is often down to the sheer expense of implementing such an initiative.

“While the impact of the solution in terms of safety and security is very beneficial in the long term, countries initially need a large enough budget to pursue the solution for long enough before seeing real ROI,” he added.

The focus around smart cities is now shifting from implementing individual smart solutions that work in silo in different industries, to creating a holistic smart city

experience. In order for cities in the region to maximise the potential of these solutions, there will inevitably be a need for an open platform to be established, whereby data can be shared across both public and private sectors for this smart experience to be integrated throughout a city.

“I’m seeing signs that this type of framework is beginning to be developed in the region, but it’s not there yet,” said Elshimy. “Dubai is leading the way in establishing this level of cooperation between sectors, and I expect this open platform to be in place by the end of 2018 in the emirate.”

Safder Nazir, Huawei’s regional vice president of digital industries, believes that the Middle East is a prime example of a region that is ripe for smart city transformation.

“The Middle East doesn’t have the legacy infrastructure problem that many other regions do,” he said.

“Instead, we have the ability to build things right first time round.” www.tahawultech.com

Smart Approach to Data Integrity and IT Infrastructure Management RCNTEC Business continuity is a hot trend for government sector, transnational corporations, industry leaders and SMB entities today. Some of business agility strategies popular today were frst adopted back in 90s by oil producing companies to automate cost-ineffective manual operations at remote sites and to integrate isolated distant oil plants into unifed interconnected infrastructure.

Dozens of engineers, developers, and architects in IT who later founded RCNTEC company consolidated their efforts to design and implement unique solutions for routing, managing, aggregating and storing sensitive corporate information for those oil companies. RCNTEC engineers believe that the best way to prevent downtimes of IT infrastructure is to take a series of measures, from implementing Disaster Recovery plan for preventing data loss, to proactively monitoring the state of information security and ensuring that known vulnerabilities will not compromise availability of infrastructure.

Business continuity plan must include measures that will increase availability of core parts of infrastructure back-end and spread to each part, including front-end. For example, the power supply critical to operation of any IT equipment usually protected with ATS and UPS devices. A new kind of remote power management device was introduced recently. The new RPCM device is a unique 1U rack power distribution unit combined with ATS functions, equipped with electricity meters on each port with remote power control and protection from short circuits.

RCS data storage allow triple data replication across the racks and ready to be scale-out across more racks or even data centers.

It is by all means a pride of RCNTEC, because this solution proved its robustness and sustainability in taking care of cost-effective storing different types of data (fles, objects, virtual containers) distributed over various data centers of one of the leading oil & gas corporations.

Keeping the IT infrastructure secure always require proactive protection, which is effectively done by solutions like COMPLAUD, capable of real-time monitoring of all hardware and software, notifying when a security update or change in policy must be applied.

As an additional way to protect the infrastructure it is always reasonable to use second factor authentication. A password is sometimes all that is needed to take over the control. Solutions like AUTH.AS use state-of-the art algorithms to protect login transactions and make man-in-the-middle attacks and password thefts absolutely pointless. It is available for both iOS- and Android-based mobile devices and easily gets along with external target-services via RADIUS and LDAP(s) protocols, and ready to be integrated with third-party apps.

Classic way of communication - the voice calls must be always available, especially during incidents in IT infrastructure. With device like Resilient SIP Box, local VoIP communication is always available Remote Power Control Module manages all devices on its 10 outputs, with dual redundant power input featured with ATS.

regardless of SIP cloud connectivity status. This solution is tested and certifed to be compatible with Broadworks solution by Broadsoft.

Modern scale-out architecture of Resilient Cloud Storage developed by RCNTEC allows to store the data in a reliable manner, with option to adjust both storage capacity and performance to run IT tasks effectively. RCS is a high-end storage system showing great results where the scaling task requires 99,99% availability of data. RCS data modules can host physical hard drives and SSDs which are accessible

Small, yet effcient Resilient SIP Box keeps cloud-based VoIP service running in situations

for applications directly under management of coordinators via high-

where cloud is not available.

throughput 10/40/100 Gbps Ethernet network. Proprietary management interfaces developed to scale-out and manage RCS

Visit DWTC booth SR-20 at GITEX Technology Week 2017 this October

storage resources allow almost infnite scalability.

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FEATURE

14

OCTOBER 2017

Mubadala Investment Company

www.tahawultech.com

JOINING FORCES Following the historic merger of Mubadala Development Company and International Petroleum Investment Company into a $125-billion-asset behemoth, work needed to be done to get both companies’ IT departments on the same page. Throughout the transformation, Mansour Al Ketbi, now CIO of the resulting Mubadala Investment Company, has proven himself a master of sound technology policy, transparency, and, most importantly, diplomacy.

O

n 21st January 2017, the UAE’s president and ruler of Abu Dhabi His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan issued a law that would combine Mubadala Development Company and International Petroleum Investment Company into one of Abu Dhabi’s most prized assets. Mubadala Investment Company is the result of the merger of two of the emirate’s most influential firms, and now constitutes a $125 billion investment powerhouse that sits at the core of the UAE’s economic strategy.

Prior to their joining, the two companies had set the bar high in terms of their interests. Their work includes the development of global industrial heavyweights in sectors including aerospace, ICT, semiconductors, metals and mining, renewable energy and utilities as well as diverse financial holdings. It also aims to build on legacy expertise in oil and gas to invest across the hydrocarbon spectrum, and enhance the UAE’s growth potential through investments in healthcare, real estate and defence services. www.tahawultech.com

At the core of the company’s values is sound governance, with the aim of delivering control and security over such a broad portfolio of assets. Now spearheading the IT department at the newborn firm, CIO Mansour Al Ketbi – also a board member for MDC Business Management Services, Injazat Data Systems and Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi – can reflect on what has been a hectic period of uncertainty with a large degree of satisfaction.

The transition has been harmonious, largely due to the measured, collaborative approach that he oversaw.

However, there was an inevitable degree of insecurity when the wheels of change were set in motion. “If you look at any merger, the first thing that comes up is resistance, whether that’s in IT or any other part of the organisation,” Al Ketbi says. “The main challenge that anybody in a specialised area faces is people comparing themselves with their counterparts, whether it’s a CIO, IT architect or operations manager. We looked at the transition as a roadmap, and we

wanted to avoid a big bang on everything that we did in IT. We looked at the essentials that would make a company reliable and stable, and could deliver all self-user requirements, while creating unified IT policies and procedures.”

Keeping staff informed of developments would be a simple yet critical step in ensuring that the company could move forward as one, rather than a splintered entity with rival factions. “Transparency was crucial to our success,” Al Ketbi says. “We tried to encourage an open working environment, and an open-door policy, creating a culture of constant communication and collaboration at all levels.” Fortunately for Al Ketbi and his management peers, the transition was made easier by an open-minded, cooperative workforce. “After the establishment of the new company, there was minimum noise from the office floor. Both organisations looked at the positives of the change. It’s normal to be resistant, but when you create the right governance and transparency, it makes things much simpler.”

OCTOBER 2017

15

FEATURE

Mubadala Investment Company

Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi is part of Mubadala Investment Company's portfolio

Naturally, there were some inherent differences between the two firms. “IPIC was more on the corporate side of IT,” Al Ketbi says.

“They have assets that are outside of the country, and were out of their control. For us it was different. My role is on a group and global level.

My mandate is to protect Mubadala and our assets, ensure that there are no attacks and that we have the right mechanisms and protection.”

Al Ketbi knew that hard facts would be needed to ensure that strategic decision making was structured and supported. Mubadala engaged “one of the big four” consultants to help it collect data around the companies’ IT architectures, with the aim of creating a unified IT strategy for the new entity.

“It took us around four weeks to crunch the numbers and come up with facts and details about all the businesses,” Al Ketbi says. “We did side visits to data centres, pulling 16

OCTOBER 2017

Blockchain has a place in Mubadala given the assets that we manage here and abroad.

out reports. We found that both organisations had different systems.”

The most straightforward solution for the new firm was to avoid compromising on quality. “We decided to take a best-of-breed approach, whether that was in ERP, or data centre architecture,” Al Ketbi says. “We tried to work with all departments to clean the data.

We made it a priority to have clean data from the HR, financials and contracts aspects, and then once we dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, we had a proper transition plan with dependencies across all the businesses.”

To ensure that work would run smoothly, the firm’s board assigned a working group steering committee, which took decisions on behalf of both organisations. The steering committee would rely on a joint project management office, which gave weekly reports on all workstreams. “Our engagement with the steering committee was minimal, because we knew what we had to do, and most decisions were based on business processes,” Al Ketbi says. “The main challenge was that we needed governance and the guidelines to structure the work we were doing, and to assist the ways we could bring people together. In terms of deciding the right techwww.tahawultech.com

FEATURE

Mubadala Investment Company

Emirates Global Aluminium is jointowned by Mubadala Investment Company and the Investment Corporation of Dubai

nologies, the only time we had to meet the steering committee was over ERP systems. My counterpart wanted to change their ERP, but we stopped that transaction before it could start.”

ERP was one of only two issues which brought initial disagreement.

“The issue of whether we would use our data centre or theirs took some discussion,” Al Ketbi says. “This was resolved by introducing our strategy to exit an on-premise model and relocate to a tier four data centre in the region. Not owning the location would take a lot of the headache away. We’ve decided to use one of the data centres temporarily, and we’ll soon start working and exiting to the off-premise site.”

Al Ketbi concedes that work still needs to be done in Mubadala Investment Company’s IT department, but is ultimately satisfied with the progress that he has seen so far. “We’re in a really mature state,” he says. “Of course, we need some tweaking here and there – by that I’m largely referring to our data centre strategy – which will get us where we want to be.”

Now that Mubadala Investment Company has taken its nascent 18

OCTOBER 2017

It’s normal to be resistant, but when you create the right governance and transparency, it makes things much simpler.

steps with its combined IT entity, Al Ketbi has set his sights on a range of exciting technologies that will help the company continue its journey into the digital age. However, a common-sense approach to risk will underpin everything that the firm does. “In the next three years, cybersecurity will be a top ongoing priority for us,” he says. “We have to ensure that Mubadala and our group

of assets are safe, and the group security operations centre will play a really important part in that. That will protect Mubadala and create economies of scale for our assets.”

The company will also be looking to leverage the broad datasets it has at its disposal. “Looking forward, we will look to expand our business intelligence and data warehousing capabilities. We’ll be moving from an on-premise model to an outsourced off-premise hybrid cloud.” The use of Blockchain could also be on the cards. “With the CFO, we’re looking into Blockchain and whether it makes sense to the company. Blockchain has a place for Mubadala given the assets that we manage here and abroad.”

The firm is also looking to call upon the use of its own investment assets to make the services that it provides for its stakeholders smarter and more efficient. In November 2015, Mubadala Development Company partnered with IBM Watson to deliver the AI service to the Middle East and North Africa region via its new ‘Cognit’ service. “We’re looking at cognitive computing and artificial intelligence, and how we can incorporate Cognit into our healthcare, aerospace or education assets,” Al Ketbi says.

Reflecting on what has been a successful shift, Al Ketbi believes that the fundamental factors in the success of merging the IT departments revolved around basic human values. “I think being honest, fact-based and transparent, saying what will go wrong and laying out risks is one part of the problem, the other is people-related,” he says.

“You need to ensure that people are safe, that job security is there so that people can put their heart into delivering good work.” www.tahawultech.com

FEATURE

20

OCTOBER 2017

DIFC Courts CEO Mark Beer OBE

www.tahawultech.com

COMMUNITY SERVICE Of all the industries that are most critical in delivering open, secure societies, the legal profession has arguably been the most resistant to digital disruption. DIFC Courts CEO Mark Beer OBE believes the legal industry is now compelled to adopt technology to become more user-friendly, and that it risks being supplanted by the private sector if it refuses to change.

“

Does society want people to feel confident in solving their problems in a court?” DIFC Courts CEO Mark Beer OBE understands better than anyone just how traditional legal systems inspire trepidation in claimants and defendants alike across the globe. “If so, give them access to one from their mobile phone. Let them beam into a court room and give evidence from a smartphone.”

Governed by English common law, DIFC Courts’ verdicts are enforced in jurisdictions including England, Wales, New York and Singapore. Its ‘Smart Small Claims Tribunal’ – a video-driven digital court that can be accessed by case participants from across the globe – has already received international acclaim. It has been visited

by Tanzanian and Qatari delegations,

www.tahawultech.com

who are now keen to follow its example, while eight members of parliament (MPs) from the United Kingdom visited in April for a first-hand look at how the Smart SCT operates, and the role it plays in attracting businesses to the UAE. MP for Eddisbury, Antoinette Sandbach, lauded the project on her visit. “The Smart SCT works so quickly and has great advantages for commercial relationships. It actually looks like this small claims system works more effectively and quickly than ours does back in the UK.” Beer, meanwhile, is in no doubt that the physical nature of traditional courtrooms has cemented their place over time as an intimidating, restricted institution that is growing increasingly unfit to solve complex and far-reaching disputes. “Courts are traditionally held in a premises,”

he says. “That’s fine, but we’re in a global world now, so it’s not one party on the high street suing a neighbour who lives down the road anymore.

It’s a case of a company in China who supplies iron ore to a company in America who uses to it to build a car, but when the product arrives it isn’t as they expect. How do you establish a court that can solve these problems?

The only way is through technology.

It needs technology to allow parties to come together in a forum which best serves their interest in finding a solution.”

He believes a change of mindset, centred around increased openness, will be key in achieving this goal.

“Courts will have to realise they’re part of an interconnected global world, and the service that they offer will have to follow suit. DIFC Courts OCTOBER 2017

21

FEATURE

DIFC Courts CEO Mark Beer OBE

Mark Beer co-chief executive registrar general DIFC Courts, and Dr. Noah Raford, chief operating officer, Dubai Future Foundation

is focused on hyper-connectivity to make sure we are the most connected court in the world, and that wherever you are, we’ll be able to help you.”

While the buildings which have traditionally housed court cases have not changed, they have been reinforced by systems that Beer believes are outdated, and hindered by a shortfall in attempts to adopt modern, practical technology. However, he also says that the motivation to do so is conspicuous by its absence. “There hasn’t been a sufficient incentive to digitalise the legal industry,” he says.

“Forget AI, we haven’t done any IA – intelligent automation. Most courts think that means moving onto an Excel spreadsheet, and that’s caused many courts around the world to lag behind other mechanisms for solving disputes, including arbitration, mediation or private sector resolutions.”

On a wider level, Beer is in no doubt that courts at large have a moral obligation to comfort the afflicted, and to instil widespread faith in a country’s legal system. This means being a trustworthy service provider, not an intimidating punishment 22

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How do you establish a court that can solve global problems?

The only way is through technology.

mechanism. “For hundreds of years, people have thought a court’s role is to be a cold, dark, windowless room where people are punished for having done the wrong thing,” he says.

“That’s wrong, and is not the right approach to solving problems. Courts

are meant to provide a service, which is to help people answer a question that they can’t answer themselves, pure and simple.”

As well as needing to make courts more user friendly, Beer also believes that making the overall citizen experience more positive is crucial in building trust. “Research has shown us that the better the service a court offers, the higher the chance of the parties settling, which has got to be a good outcome for any court to look at settlements as a KPI,” he says. “The perception of justice in the market has more to do with how people view the journey in the court than the decision at the end.”

He goes on to add that nations who choose to adapt their legal systems will help to foster a feeling of trust towards the state. “There is no doubt in my mind that we will see radical transformations in countries and states who want to be seen as being a safe place to live, where citizens have faith in society. They will be the ones who invest heavily in court systems.

They will do better economically and socially than societies who don’t.” www.tahawultech.com

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FEATURE

DIFC Courts CEO Mark Beer OBE

While the need to deliver an improved experience for court users is a top priority for Beer, he is also mindful that technology could be set to transform the jobs of millions of legal professionals. Research from The University of Oxford and Citi has revealed that a staggering portion of jobs are at risk of being automated – 47 percent of those in the US, 77 percent of those in China and 85 percent of those in Ethiopia – and Beer does not believe that the legal profession is exempt from this potential cull. He believes that even highly trained and intelligent legal professionals who may perceive their skills to be indispensable are sorely mistaken. “We’re moving to a world where the commoditised delivery of a professional service is valueless,” he says. “If you’re going to be a lawyer, you need to do something different. Technology is disintermediating the legal service in the same way that it’s disintermediating the medical service and teaching. It takes away a commoditised service that lawyers have traditionally been able to charge you by the hour for.” However, he does believe there is light at the end of the tunnel for those who are willing to adapt. “At the moment, computers can’t create or think outside of the box, but they soon will.

They also can’t build human relationships as well as we can.”

Although Beer acknowledges that human beings are fundamental in the role of a successful court, he does believe that less critical cases could be managed via automation. “We’re already seeing that computers are as good as, and if not better than us at dealing with small disputes,” he says. “Look at DoNotPay. Before, if you got a speeding ticket, you’d go to a lawyer who’d charge more than the cost of paying it off. Now, you go to a website, type in your ticket number, choose your defence from a 24

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Courts are there to help people answer a question that they can’t answer themselves.

drop-down menu, then they process the whole thing for you. It’s achieving a success rate beyond any lawyer’s imagination.” He believes judicial systems would be enhanced by similar initiatives. “A vast amount of complaints can be taken out of the system by making it more efficient. You can leave the courts to what they do best, which is dealing with complex, technical cases.”

Beer’s thinking isn’t confined to the legal industry. He has already spied a gap in the market for the ways that everyday retail disputes are solved. “How long until there’s a global online platform for them? If you look at what Alibaba are doing in Hangzhou, and Tencent, eBay and Amazon are doing with their platforms in Shenzhen, these are privately led dispute services, but ultimately, they’ll need to convert their decision into being a matter of law. I think we’ll see the intersection of private dispute resolution and public dispute resolution in order to cater for the global retail market. Governments will need to decide whether they are happy to let the private sector take over some of these mechanisms.”

In the meantime, Beer is playing his part in helping Dubai swiftly adjust its legal system to the range of emerging technologies that could flood the market. The organisation has partnered with the Dubai Future

Foundation to deliver the Courts of the Future Forum, which will bring together technology and legal experts to evaluate the implications and uses of emerging technologies. Courts of the Future is already exploring judicial issues around the ownership and use of data; cybersecurity and data breaches and licensing and standards for technologies like connected, autonomous and flying cars, drones, 3D printers and Blockchain.

DIFC Courts’ new Technology and Construction Division, meanwhile, will hear technology-related cases including those around cybercrime incidents, disputes over the ownership and use of data, and issues relating to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and connected vehicles.

“We’re only offering a small part of a much broader governmental programme – with initiatives such as Smart Dubai and 10X – to ensure that Dubai remains a city of the future,” Beer says. “Another part of it will be the legislative regime, and making sure the laws are up to the standards of such a city. We’ve already seen reform at a legislative level in relation to driverless cars, drones and other initiatives. Making sure that legislation keeps pace with technological demands will be significant, but Dubai is doing more than any other city to make sure that laws keep pace.” www.tahawultech.com

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EVENT

Evolve Digital Transformation Forum

EVOLVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FORUM 2017

CPI Media Group and Tahawul Tech are delighted to present the inaugural technology summit: Evolve – A Digital Transformation Forum, which is set to be held on Tuesday 24th October at Jumeirah Beach Hotel in Dubai.

N

ow more than ever, businesses are under pressure to adapt their services to a global, ever-demanding audience that expects products to be delivered over the Internet and mobile apps.

The consumerisation and ubiquity of technology has been something of a curve ball for IT employees.

Perhaps unexpectedly for some, this shift has given IT leaders the chance to be the heroes of the hour.

Digital transformation is defined as the methodology enterprises can use to transform and create new business models and culture with digital technologies. However, as the IT industry knows too well, this is all easier said than done.

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CPI Media Group’s Evolve Digital Transformation Forum will attract more than 300 C-level digital leaders from the Middle East’s public and private sectors, and will shed light on the strategies needed for regional businesses to map out their transformation journey.

We host a selection of industry experts who will share the story of their journey on how they invested in technology which allowed them to transform their business. The conference will comprise three panel discussions – on government, e-commerce and the need to invest in technology. These will follow keynote speeches for each section.

With a young, tech-savvy population, the GCC finds itself at a crossroads in its digital journey. The region’s governments have all put technology at

the core of their economic strategies, and this shift in policy necessitates sound decision-making and forwardthinking. This means improved training opportunities for aspiring IT leaders within the country, and the need to make the Middle East an attractive prospect for foreign IT recruits.

Evolve’s government-focused panel discussion will comprise thought leaders who will discuss how governments need to set the tone for technological transformation in the region.

Another impending shift that the Middle East is set to be disrupted by is the rise of e-commerce. While markets such as the United Kingdom now see more than 10% of all purchases made online, the Middle East currently has figure in the region of www.tahawultech.com

As the IT industry knows too well, digitally transforming is easier said than done.

www.tahawultech.com

3%. With some of the world’s highest smartphone penetration levels occurring across the GCC, and the relatively small physical size of countries such as the UAE, that is all set to change.

E-commerce is touted to be a $20 billion market opportunity by 2020, with emerging markets such as the Middle East ripe for changes in online purchasing. However, the continued growth for e-commerce players hinges on many factors such as cross-border customs regulations, availability of secure payment solutions and shipping and handling standards. Can they adapt to changing market dynamics to make this region a hub for online purchasing?

Our e-commerce keynote and panel discussion will explore the next steps

that the Middle East must take in its shift to online purchasing models.

Underpinning these two shifts is the need to build an environment that will allow this region to succeed as a global technology hub. In its short history, the UAE has made huge strides in a number of the world’s most important industries, and has broken various records in the process. However, it still has some way to go in the field of homegrown technology research and development. What are the next steps the UAE needs to take in order to create an internationally recognised innovation hub, that can spawn high-tech start-ups and lure top-notch technical talent to the region? Why should investors put their money into this country’s technology industry?

OCTOBER 2017

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Evolve Digital Transformation Forum

CPI Media Group already has a fantastic selection of confirmed speakers for Evolve.

Donna Benton, founder and CEO, The Entertainer In 2001, Donna Benton launched the Entertainer – the region’s leading provider of two-for-one offers for the best restaurants, attractions and hotel stays. The Entertainer has enjoyed phenomenal growth by virtue of a strong partner network, a burgeoning corporate loyalty business, and a broad base of delighted customers.

It has also successfully transitioned from being a printed book of vouchers to a data-driven digital business via its award-winning app, which launched in 2013. Today, the Entertainer covers 19 destinations in 15 countries worldwide – with offers from over 10,000 merchant partners.

Akram Assaf, co-founder and CTO, Bayt.com One of the four co-founders of the Middle East’s leading jobs website, Bayt.com, Akram Assaf now sits as the company’s chief technology officer. Akram has guided 400-employee Bayt through the trials and tribulations of the dot-com boom and into the digital age, and the firm now has 13 offices across 11 countries to 28

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support its 10 million monthly users.

Akram’s innovative and efficient approaches to technology have been critical in accelerating the digital transformation of the GCC’s recruitment industry.

Sam Blatteis, CEO MENA Tech Brief Founder of MENA Tech Brief and Google’s former head of government relations and public policy for the Gulf, Sam Blatteis is a UAE-based American technology executive, global thought leader, and specialist on the Middle Eastern digital economy, technology public policy, and Middle Eastern market access for global tech companies. In his time at Google, Sam was responsible for all of Google’s policy diplomacy in the region. He previously worked in the U.S. Senate, the State Department, at Deloitte and Touche, and advised the White House, Fortune 500 Companies, and numerous head-of-state offices on Middle East innovation and investment.

Seham Hanif, Head of Digital Banking, UAE & ME, Standard Chartered Seham brings over 11 years of experience in the banking industry, with a large focus on digital banking. She

With a young, tech-savvy population, the GCC finds itself at a crossroads in its digital journey.

has a proven track-record of transforming traditional business models with market-driven insights and innovation, and has managed multiple markets and worked across different geographies as a business head.

Jonathan Rawling, CFO, Yallacompare.com Jonathan Rawling is a certified insurance professional and CFO of Yallacompare.com. Prior to joining the online comparison site, Rawling spent 20 years working in the insurance industry in the UK, Switzerland, Australia, the Middle East and Turkey, and knows better than anyone how the insurance industry is being disrupted by technology. He was audit director at Zurich Corporate Centre, and, more recently, CFO for Zurich in the Middle East and Turkey. Rawling has deep knowledge of the insurance industry at both the global and Middle Eastern level. www.tahawultech.com

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FEATURE

Blockchain: the story so far

NEW KID ON THE BLOCK Nine out of ten government organisations across the world are tipped to invest in blockchain technology by 2018, and Dubai’s government has set out its stall to be a leader in the adoption wave. When can we expect to see blockchain become a mainstream technology in enterprises across the region?

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www.tahawultech.com

S

o much of our day-to-day life now revolves around the Internet. We shop online; we communicate online; we bank online – but can any of us completely and collectively trust what actually happens behind this increasingly universal presentation layer?

However, the hype surrounding the adoption of blockchain technology looks as if it may finally materialise, and begin to transform how we conduct and record these digital transactions. Based on distributed ledger technology, blockchain is essentially a reliable, hard-to-hack record of transactions and information, and has the potential to create new foundations across economic and social systems globally.

IBM’s Institute for Business Value study found that government organisations worldwide are prioritising blockchain to help reduce innovation roadblocks and inaccurate or incomplete information across their organisation. Trust is of the utmost importance for governments, and this need to eliminate a lack of transparency, find ways to expand the economy and improve accountability is only going to increase, believes Victor Usobiaga, blockchain business development, IBM Middle East and Pakistan. “Integrating blockchain technology into

www.tahawultech.com

government activities can help overcome this lack of trust, and presents a range of uses for both central and local governments,” he says.

Blockchain is no longer a buzzword, either – particularly in this region. Dubai has made significant progress in this field over the last 12 months, following the announcement of various ambitious public sector targets, as well as the establishment of The Global Blockchain Council last year. This government initiative brings together public and private sectors to identify test cases for new blockchain business models across the emirate, and has led to a huge swell of investment in the blockchain domain.

The establishment of the Blockchain Council coincided with the launch of Dubai’s Blockchain Strategy, which aims to transform Dubai’s government to becoming completely paperless by 2020. The government also claims that blockchain has the potential to generate 25.1 million hours of economic productivity each year in savings, as well as AED 5.5 billion in annual savings on document processing alone.

“The Dubai Government is trying to place the emirate at the forefront of technology development,” says Grant Niven, associate partner, technology and transformation advisory, EY. “The aim is to create an OCTOBER 2017

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Blockchain: the story so far

environment in which government departments naturally work with established businesses and start-ups to tackle specific challenges, while also creating the infrastructure to allow residents to start new blockchainbased businesses.”

But just how many of these “blockchain-based” organisations can we expect to see in coming years?

“The use of blockchain applications is no longer pegged to the far-away future, but the technology is still nascent,” says Ahmed Helmy, director of Avaya’s advanced solution architecture, international markets.

“Regional leaders are currently assessing the use of blockchain for use within their operations, but realise that the actual deployment of this technology is complex in nature and requires a multitude of different technology skillsets.”

The natural progression, Helmy believes, will likely involve the augmentation of existing business processes with blockchain technology, in order to achieve an increased level of integrity and transparency over a business’ data.

You cannot digitise the law via smart contracts, but you can definitely make life more auditable and efficient by using them.

Grant Niven, associate partner, technology and transformation advisory, EY

Similarly, Kirill Nikolaev, founder of BITCOIN VIP, believes that the boom of blockchain will be similar to what we saw with the introduction of the Internet, which has seen 1.8 billion people come online since 2004, according to the ITU. “Organisations can either use this technology and mix it with their current business processes, or simply choose to ignore it,” he says. “But

The use of blockchain applications is no longer pegged to the far-away future, but the technology is still nascent.

Ahmed Helmy, director, advanced solution architecture, international markets, Avaya 32

OCTOBER 2017

there will inevitably be organisations in the Middle East that capitalise on the potential of blockchain, while others will try, and not be so successful.”

Aside from government entities giving their backing to blockchain, financial institutions across the UAE are also beginning to envisage the technology’s potential.

Emirates NBD launched an initiative known as ‘Cheque Chain’ earlier this year, which has seen blockchain technology in the form of a unique QR code printed on every leaf of the newly issued cheque books, thereby strengthening their authenticity and reducing the risk of fraud by making it difficult to forge cheques. National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) was also hailed as the first bank in the Middle East to introduce real-time, cross-border payments on blockchain in February, allowing customers to cut the cost and increase the speed of payments.

In real estate, Aston Plaza and Residences – a luxury development currently under construction in Dubai Science Park – has become the “first www.tahawultech.com

major residential project globally” to be valued in bitcoin. This sector could also take advantage of the ‘smart contracts’ that blockchain has to offer, believes Helmy. “If we look at the real estate market, the process of selling a home still involves a large number of players and manual steps,” he explains. “The use of smart contracts can revolutionise the nature of these transactions, decreasing the cost of administration and allowing a quicker turn-around of projects.”

According to Hileman and Rauchs’ ‘Global Blockchain Benchmarking’ study, two thirds of blockchain operators already have fully functional smart contract capabilities – which are essentially documents that automatically execute when a set of condi-

sector currently is one of timing.

When will the hundreds of pilots and trial periods that have already been announced come to market? “The answer to this will be revealed in the coming 12 months,” says Niven.

Nevertheless, between the continued push towards smart cities and initiatives such as the Dubai Future Accelerators, there are indications that suggest blockchain is here to stay, and could become a priority for businesses across industries sooner than some may have first thought, believes Nikolaev. “In the next 3-4 years, I believe that blockchain will be a mainstream technology in enterprises across the region, particularly in the government and transportation sectors,” he says.

tions are met. “When running these contracts on blockchain, they become verifiable and auditable by all network participants, which is where the value comes in,” explains Niven. “But like anything, rigorous testing needs to be undertaken to determine if smart contracts can be completely trusted. Of course, you cannot digitise the law via smart contracts, as they cannot act as a judge, juror or executioner, but you can definitely make life more auditable and efficient by using them.”

In its relative infancy, it is very difficult to benchmark blockchain’s mass adoption in the region with hard statistics as you would, for example, with economic growth indicators such as GDP. Instead, perhaps the biggest open question in the blockchain

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FEATURE

Millennials and GCC tech

YOUNG GUNSS The World Economic Forum estimates that over half of the region’s current population is already under the age of 25, and by 2050, 54 percent is expected to be under 36 years of age. How will this growing population of millennials shape the future of technology in the Middle East?

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A

ccording to generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe, millennials are, by definition, those born between 1982 and 1997.

Widely recognised as the first ‘native technologist’ generation, their attitudes and expectations have already forced businesses across the world to transform, and this is just the beginning.

The Middle East in particular is renowned for being inundated with young people immersing themselves in the GCC’s entrepreneurial mindset.

But this evolving workforce, combined with huge shifts in the technology industry, mean that disruption is inevitable for regional organisations.

“Millennials are going to create major shifts in corporations over the next decade, and most organisations aren’t ready for the amount of change that’s coming,” says Shukri Eid, managing director, east region, Cisco Middle East. “Millennials will force companies to be transparent; they want to create an honest and open culture where there aren’t any barriers between workers of different

levels, and where everyone knows what’s going on in the company.”

But as expectations change and technology evolves, businesses, IT leaders and workers must be increasingly flexible moving forward.

“Millennials have definite expectations about how digital systems should behave, and see a significant gap between their experience of digital systems on the consumer side and the reality of what digital systems in the enterprise can deliver,” says Chris Pope, VP of strategy, Service Now. “IT must shrink that gap if it wants to boost millennials’ productivity and, more importantly, harness their talents to help differentiate the business moving forward.”

Unsurprisingly, young people within the workplace favour digital channels over the more traditional means of business – be it for communication, purchasing or research purposes.

Forty-one percent of millennials that took part in a PwC survey said they prefer to communicate electronically at work, rather than face to face or even over the phone. “Previously, managers preferred face-to-face

Millennials see a significant gap between their experience of digital systems on the consumer side and the reality of what the enterprise can deliver.

Chris Pope, VP of strategy, Service Now www.tahawultech.com

meetings, but millennials will be looking to embrace video conferencing in the future, especially as the technology becomes more developed,” says Eid. “They will expect a workplace technology ecosystem that includes social networking, instant messaging, video-on-demand, blogs and wikis.”

These social tools will ultimately enable this generation to “instantly connect, engage and collaborate with cohorts and managers in ways that are natural to them,” leading to better productivity across the enterprise.

With the UAE’s mantle of having the highest smartphone penetration rate globally, this tech-savvy generation, equipped with business tools in their pocket, will soon perceive office attendance as archaic. “Working from home will become the norm, with more millennials wanting to work remotely, and on their own clock, instead of the confined nine-to-five workday,” Eid adds.

Digital by default This digitally focused mindset can also be seen outside of day-to-day work operations. A recent study conducted by Visa Performance Solutions revealed that 61 percent of millennials in the UAE and 81 percent in Saudi Arabia spend an average of 3-4 hours a day on social media – significantly higher than their non-millennial counterparts. While non-work usage is frustrating for an employer, fear not, for this could in fact be a benefit and not a burden.

“In the UAE, 41 percent of millennials use social media to express opinions, 25 percent to make purchases, and 23 percent to browse product information,” says Kriti Makker, director of Visa Performance Solutions MENA. “This is a great opportunity for businesses, issuers and merchants to leverage social media as a channel to OCTOBER 2017

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FEATURE

Millennials and GCC tech

drive lead generation and registration, and create customer engagement.”

This opportunity can be applicable across industries, particularly financial services and retailers, and Makker believes that organisations must tailor their business models to four key areas if they are to extract the most potential from this generation. “First is personalisation and targeted offers, second is becoming digital by default and providing a voice to customers across digital channels. Third is having a multichannel focus and providing frictionless customer experience across channels, and fourth is to provide relevant communications with contextual offers to customers,” she says.

Eid agrees, and believes that, “Millennial customers are about to become the most important customers a business has ever seen.” Organisations must first “understand these customers if they’re going to be able to create millennial-friendly sales and customer experience,” he adds.

Various industries across the UAE have already sought to adapt their strategies in a bid to remain one step ahead of the competition, and consistently place their younger customers at the core of what they do. Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company recently launched the Virgin Mobile brand in the UAE, allowing users to choose their own mobile number and customise their data and minutes plans. Competitor Etisalat, meanwhile, unveiled its millennial-specific SIM card Swyp, with enhanced mobile data offerings over traditional SMS and minutes for a generation that favours communication apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Emirates NBD has also capitalised on this generation Y overhaul, and launched the UAE’s first millennialfocused digital banking app earlier this 36

OCTOBER 2017

Millennials value entrepreneurship and startups more than past generations, with the majority of young people loving the idea of being self-employed.

Shukri Eid, managing director, east region, Cisco Middle East year. Users have the option to register for Liv. using their social media login or email address, and can take advantage of the lifestyle offers from partners such as Burger King, Costa Coffee and TGI Fridays.

Another major differentiator from Emirates NBD’s traditional app is that there is no physical branch attached to the Liv. intiative. This concept of moving financial services to being purely digitally based with no real need for branches is one we are increasingly seeing banks explore in the region, and it is no wonder when Visa’s research revealed that in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, millennials preferred phone calls and messages as the top communication channels when dealing with financial representatives.

“Desensitising and almost dehumanising the approach is part of a larger generational shift where the outcome of a transaction of service is more important than the delivery or consumption of the service,” believes Pope.

Investment in these technologybased initiatives can also be seen through the evolving start-up space here in the region. The UAE and Saudi Arabia ranked 19th and 30th in the Global Entrepreneurship Index 2017, and last year, the amount of cash pumped into tech firms more than quadrupled, reaching $870 million.

However, the vast majority of this – $625 million – flowed into just two firms: online retailer Souq; and Careem, the Dubai-based rival to Uber.

Eid believes that this entrepreneurial culture within the region is one that millennials are particularly suited to, and one that we can expect to thrive as their desire to be their own boss develops. “Millennials value entrepreneurship and start-ups more than past generations, with the majority of young people loving the idea of being self-employed,” he says. “Entrepreneurs of this generation will seek to start their own business for three key reasons: a desire to be a master of their own lives, to turn their ideas into a reality, and to make money.” www.tahawultech.com

FEATURE

Clint Boulton, CIO

HOW TO FEND OFF DIGITAL DISRUPTION Anticipating future opportunities based on hard and soft trends is a crucial weapon in helping CIOs stave off being a victim of digital transformation. Clint Boulton explores what is needed to commit to an ‘anticipatory IT’ strategy.

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www.tahawultech.com

M

ost enterprises, afraid of losing ground to competitors in the digital era, are moving at such a rapid pace that they often miss warning signs that portend disruption before it’s too late. But companies can prepare themselves and help fend off this innovator’s dilemma by capitalising on emerging trends and anticipating where their respective industries are heading.

That is what futurist and author Daniel Burrus proposes in his new book, The Anticipatory Organisation: turn disruption and change into opportunity and advantage, which is due for release on 10th Octber. His theory? Change is linear, exponential and predictable: Burrus found that 93 percent of 1,000 companies he surveyed said their biggest problem had been predictable — they just weren’t looking in the right areas.

Burrus emphasises that one of the main reasons companies are www.tahawultech.com

Every disruption that has ever happened was there to see.

disrupted is that they are so busy looking in the rearview mirror that they miss opportunities looming in their front windshield. If brickand-mortar retailers had paid attention to e-commerce trends and a startup called Amazon.com, they wouldn’t be closing hundreds of stores a year. If Blockbuster and others had moved quicker to streaming video perhaps Netflix wouldn’t have starved them out

of business. If BlackBerry, then Research in Motion, had moved more quickly to address the iPhone, perhaps it wouldn’t have been left scrambling for purchase.

Disruption is there - if you look “Every disruption that has ever happened was there to see,” Burrus says. “Why didn’t a cab driver think of Uber? Why didn’t the big hotel chains think of Airbnb? They’re all really busy. You can busy yourself right out of business.”

However, tuning into an anticipatory mindset is easier said that done for IT leaders. CIOs, many of whom are juggling roles that require them to be transformational, functional and strategic, are busy reacting and responding to threats and challenges to their businesses. And when CIOs do spy opportunity, getting the C-suite and board to buy into what they’re selling is a tough task.

Burrus offers some strategic recommendations to help CIOs get executive buy-in and fend off disruption.

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FEATURE

Clint Boulton, CIO

To avoid disruption, CIOs must be aware of hard and soft trends. A hard trend is a projection based on measurable, tangible, and fully predictable facts, events, or objects. It’s a future fact that cannot be changed.

A soft trend is a projection based on statistics that have the appearance of being tangible, fully predictable facts. In other words, something that could well materialise.

Hard trends include the fact that employee demographics will skew younger as baby boomers retire and cede the workforce to Generation Xers and millennials. It makes sense for CIOs to leverage these trends to drive innovation. Rather than eyeing younger employees with distrust, CIOs should “cherry pick” some and loop them in to senior-level meetings. That will empower and inspire millennials to help drive the company forward.

Another hard trend is that industries will become more regulated.

Burrus points to how Tesla CEO Elon Musk has capitalised on regulations to grow multiple companies under the banner of efficient energy solutions. “He used government regulations for every single business he got into. He’s played that regulation card, why shouldn’t you?

If you spend a little more time looking at regulation you can see amazing opportunity,” Burrus says.

Soft trends include the assumption that retail sales will increase over the next year and that it will become increasingly difficult to attract talent. The good news?

Soft trends can be applied to hard trends to trigger change and CIOs should look to do so where possible. Hard trend: Cloud, mobility, analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain can enable companies to transform 40

OCTOBER 2017

Rather than eyeing younger employees with distrust, CIOs should cherry pick some and loop them into senior meetings.

their business processes. The soft trend question: Will your company transform its business processes?

Ultimately, by understanding the differences between hard and soft trends CIOs can more accurately understand and predict future disruptions and identify and solve problems before they happen, Burrus says.

What should CIOs do?

The scenario is all-too familiar. A CIO identifies an opportunity and appeals to the business for money to drive it forward. But the CIO who admits to their C-suite that the outcome is uncertain and struggles to get the budget to proceed. Burrus says CIOs should identify and articulate the impact of not implementing project x, y or z. “Go in with hard trends and help them to know that the price of no is far more than the price of the yes. Certainty gives you the confidence to make bold moves and write a big check.

Uncertainty does not.”

Burrus also encourages CIOs

to take a leap into the unknown.

For example, he said FedEx could disrupt the logistics industry by abandoning shipping fees and instead leveraging the data it collects from sensors tracking its packages.

“You have to get enough people to use FedEx shipping to get enough data to make it worth more than charging them to ship. How do you do that? If all shipping is completely and totally free they will make a lot more money.” Similarly, Burrus suggests that a drug company could charge based on patient results instead of the medications it sells. “If you charge for results instead, what happens? You create an ecosystem that’s committed,” Burrus said. “It’s a game-changer.”

With the world eager to adopt cloud, mobile, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, they cease to be a competitive advantage. “We need to be good at the other side of the coin and that is the ability to anticipate,” Burrus says . “Agility is an ideal strategy for unpredictable change. Anticipatory is the way to turn change into opportunity because you can see it coming. Act on change before it happens and solve problems before you have them. If it can be done it will be done and if you don’t do it someone else will.”

Burrus believes that, fundamentally, CIOs need to look forward, rather than back. “Your position as the CIO or IT leader has never been more important or more vital,” he says. “How you view the future shapes how you act in the present and how you act in the present shapes your future. Right now, our future view is a rearview mirror, it’s not a windshield with bright beams.

Your job is to create your future based on where we are going.” www.tahawultech.com

PROMOTIONAL FEATURE

Digital transformation

THE TRANSFORMATION EVOLUTION How can CIOs distinguish the types of technologies that can help them succeed in their digital evolution, and does a culture of hype around digitalisation increase their risk of failure?

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www.tahawultech.com

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n the face of vast industry hype, pressure from company leaders and constrained budgets, it can be easy for CIOs to lose sight of what their digital transformation initiatives are trying to achieve. With the entire technology industry now obsessed with this concept, IT leaders have been thrust into the spotlight to manage challenges that were often alien to them.

Khurram Mir, chief marketing officer, Kualitatem, believes that it is too easy to get carried away with technologies that may not actually add genuine value to users or the company.

“They key to success in the digital journey is not think about technology, but the business,” he says. “A lot of talk around digitalisation in 2017 revolves around hype or people showing off. A better approach is to think about problems you are facing, and how the they could be solved by technology.

In my opinion, digital transformation progress is hindered by hype.”

Trriple CEO Paolo Gagliardi, meanwhile, believes it is important to not only measure results, but also to enlist those who can think outside the box when deciding on the technologies that will appeal

The key barometer for what should and shouldn’t be digitalised is ROI; is the investment worth it? to customers. “IT decision makers need to look at best practices in the market, check KPIs, and consider involving young minds into the decision and implementation process, because they will contribute with an angle and a vision which companies today are all too often missing,” he says.

Mir also believes that while the GCC has undoubted potential to make its society more technologyoriented, it still has work to do in its bid to become a digitalised society. “Middle East organisations are still trying to replicate the success of countries in other markets in terms of digital transformation efforts,” he says. “There’s definitely been some progress, but if you take banks

www.tahawultech.com

OCTOBER 2017

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FEATURE PROMOTIONAL FEATURE

as an example, they’re generally not nearly as digitalised as those in the US or Europe.” He goes on to add that fundamental issues that define digital transformation have not yet come to the fore in the region. “We’re at very early stages in the whole digitalisation process. The term digital evolution is probably more apt, and the idea of digital transformation is probably a bit overcooked – we’re not quite there yet. User interfaces and experiences are not yet discussed at the levels they could be. There’s still a transition around things like offline to online forms, and that sort of thing needs to be a given in a digitalised world.”

Gagliardi takes a more positive outlook, saying that pockets of the region have made significant progress in this journey. “The United Arab Emirates and Dubai have set the standard in this respect,” he says. “The country has already achieved an impressive level of digitalisation across many public and private services, and will soon move into full integration of many of those. Government and municipal services, healthcare, immigration and higher education are but a few examples, not to mention the ambition to become a cashless society by 2021.” He does, however, agree with Mir that digital transformations may be cases of gradual, evolutionary change rather than a big bang. “Many other countries have just started the process, while others are entering its early stages,” he says. “However, technology moves very fast, faster than anything else in today’s business as we know it, therefore transformation and evolution will soon need to coexist for quite a while. The alternative is to transform into something which will be obsolete at the moment of reaching the public or mass users.”

A key factor behind the lag that Mir suggests could be resilience within organisations who, for generations, 44

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Digital transformation

IT decision makers need to look at best practices in the market, check KPIs, and consider involving young minds into the decision and implementation process.

have thrived in a largely manual mode of operations. Gagliardi is dismayed that certain organisations have not yet woken up to the need to centre their roadmaps around technology.

He also believes that with a regional market that comprises the younger generations, IT’s importance cannot be ignored. “Many businesses still do not see digital transformation as a hot topic,” he says. “The reality is that the time is ripe for planning and implementing. Sometimes it’s a case of transformation, and at others it will be a case of revolution. However, there is no turning back. The reason why is simple: millennials are moving towards the core of our society now, becoming the ‘pillar of influence’. They move the economy, they produce and they consume. They express opinions and they influence. Millennials do everything from a smartphone. Any business without digital channels will soon be out of business.”

Mir agrees, citing the need for enhanced user experiences as critical in adopting digital processes that can make customers’ lives easier. “Now more than ever, customers expect a seamless experience with technology, with no hiccups,” he says. “The vast usage of mobile apps and devices has made it more and more critical for end users to be satisfied,” Mir says.

“Currently, there are lots of use cases of where companies are not making users’ lives as easy as they could be through technology,” he says. “The reality is that they can’t be in this shape for too long.”

How much is too much?

While few doubt what can be achieved by having end-to-end digital processes across an enterprise, achieving this end goal is much easier said than done. The reality is that technical complexity will inevitably ensue, and CIOs have to be realistic in the areas that they target for introducing a digital approach, rather than wasting their efforts on deploying technology for the sake of technology. “A complete and utter change at one go is unrealistic, not to mention burdensome for the entire organisation,” Gagliardi says. “Various aspects of a business have a tendency to work in silos. So technically, the more that can be digitalised the better, starting from the customer-facing functions and down to the backend.”

Another school of thought suggests that, inevitably, human beings will have to remain prevalent in a number of aspects. “Some things have to remain manual,” Mir says.

“The key barometer for what should and shouldn’t be digitalised is ROI; is the investment worth it? Processes which require more interaction with people should be kept as they are.

It’s important not to lose that human touch altogether.” www.tahawultech.com

Building the digital workplace What comes next in the mobile revolution?

Mobile strategy is at an inflection point Many companies have yet to meaningfully change strategies around mobile, but the number with mature mobile strategies are expected to rise sharply by 2020.

Percent of companies with integrated strategies for mobile

44%

23% TODAY

IN THREE YEARS

Digital work means more than mobility The explosion in mobile maturity will drive the development of digital work, and strategies are changing to support the shift.

61% are building support for off-site environments

59% make data securely avilable to all relevent users

31% have policies to safeguard sensitive info when contract workers leave

Oxford Economics worked with Citrix to survey 600 business and IT executives around the world and accross industries to measure their progress toward digital work. We found that big changes are happening – but much work remains to be done.

Digital work takes work Change of this magnitude is never easy, and there are meaningful barriers to digital work.

Top barriers to virtual artwork Concerns about security

Cost of technology

Lack of IT skills and training

Digital work pays off Organisations demonstrating the strongest capabilities for mobility and digital work – we call them digital workspace leaders – perform at a higher level than others.

Digital work drives financial success

Digital work helps attract and retain superior talent

LEADERS

OTHERS

SOURCE: OXFORD ECONOMICS

ANALYSIS

Data Centre Build 2017

BUILDING BLOCKS Now in its fifth year, the Data Centre Build conference returned to Dubai's Habtoor Grand Resort last month, to shed light on the latest trends and best practices impacting modern data centres.

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n an increasingly virtualised and digitalised world, enterprise IT environments need to be agile, scalable and future-proof if they are to succeed. To address these needs, businesses are expected to transform their data centres to ones that enable infrastructure convergence, optimisation and automation, while also saving energy and costs.

James Dartnell, editor of CNME, kicked off the day’s proceedings by pinpointing what keeps CIOs awake at night when it comes to deliberating their data centre transformations.

“The CIOs of 2017 face a daunting task in terms of data centre management and decision making, and it remains one of their greatest sources of sleepless nights,” he said. “The data centre of today has to be reliable, secure and cost-efficient, but, as we all know, fulfilling those mandates is easier said than done.”

He then welcomed Clinton O’Leary, chief commercial officer at YVOLV on stage, to shed light on the importance of ensuring data centres are ready for the Internet of Things (IoT).

“To do IoT in this day and age, you need massive scalability,” he said.

“But it is also important to consider the ability to integrate applications at the end-point, and connect them to a service on demand. IT devices in 2017 need to talk in real time.”

Osama Abed, Nexans Network 48

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New technologies continually dictate the new rules we should abide by in redesigning our data centres.

Osama Abed, technical manager, Gulf, Middle East, East and South Africa, Nexans Network Solutions Solutions’ technical manager for the Gulf, Middle East, East and South Africa region, went on to discuss the importance of an efficient cabling design within a data centre.

“As the need for speed within data centres continues to evolve, so must our awareness in ensuring we change our cabling design accordingly,” he said. “New technologies continually dictate the new rules we should abide by in redesigning our data centres, but service availability, security and energy efficiency are also key factors to consider during this process from a cabling point of view.”

Arathi Ajay, Intel’s technical account manager for its Data Centre Group, gave the audience an insight into the data centre architecture we can expect to see in the future.

“The current structure of a legacy data centre involves compute, storage and network, but these three aspects are siloed – they don’t talk to each other, and this is a major pain point for IT executives to deal with” she said.

To address growing data centre demands and provide the added benefits of agility, scalability and global reach, Ajay went on to pinpoint hybrid cloud as the answer. It offers significant benefits for organisations, allowing them to start small and expand as needed, extending their data centre into the public cloud securely and with the same security policy constructs in use in their private cloud.

Mohit Pal, Fujitsu’s enterprise channel and product manager for Western Europe, the Middle East and India, was also an advocate of the hybrid strategy, saying it is “impossible” for businesses to not be hybrid today.

“Hybrid creates the perfect balance, and brings businesses both flexibility and relevance in the market,” he added.

Rubrik’s sales director Mohammmed Al Tamimi, and Ashish Sodhi, sales engineer for SUSE’s Middle East and Levant regions, also featured in the conference’s presentations. www.tahawultech.com

Download the white paper here: https://www.suse.com/solutions/digital-transformation/

INSIGHT

Clint Boulton, CIO

EIGHT STEPS TO THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE Clint Boulton explores how to to craft a workplace that boosts engagement and agility.

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rue digital transformation goes all the way through to the core.

And that includes an often overlooked aspect: the workplace itself.

Yes, modernising IT systems, overhauling business processes and stacking talent benches are crucial undertakings. But such initiatives lay bare a chicken-and-egg problem that many CIOs must scramble to address: that good customer experience first requires a good employee experience in the form of a digital workplace, says Gartner analyst Carol Rozwell.

What is the digital workplace? It is a business strategy aimed at boosting employee engagement and agility through consumerisation of the work environment, Rozwell says. Think of your one-size-fits-all-users ERP or expense management applications and imagine the opposite user experience. Your digital workplace should help individuals and teams work more productively without compromising operations. It should include computers, mobile devices and productivity and collaboration 50

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applications that are web-based and sync in real time. Such tools should, for example, mimic the ease of use of Uber and Airbnb and the social aspects of Facebook and Instagram.

IBM, for one, has undertaken a massive transformation of its workplace to lure new tech talent.

“The idea of the digital workplace is to bring that same simplicity and intuitiveness to employees when they’re doing their mission-critical work,” Rozwell says. Maybe you’ve heard your CIO peers talk about “getting ahead of shadow IT”?

They mean facilitating, rather than prohibiting, consumerisation.

Vision Your digital workplace plan should align with business and digital transformation goals – and clearly answer why you want to overhaul your work environment. Remember, your goal is to increase employee engagement and productivity. Work closely with stakeholders, including business, HR and facilities managers, to shape the plan and execute changes, bearing in

mind the workplace demographics and potential impact those changes will have. How will these efforts change business processes? Don’t make and execute on technology platform decisions until you achieve clarity and agreement on the digital workplace’s purpose and objectives. This will consume significant budget, so remember to get buy-in from the rest of the C-suite and board of directors.

Strategy Next, establish a roadmap and blueprint for coordinating digital workplace initiatives across R&D, marketing, sales, customer support, manufacturing, HR and IT. Questions to ask: How will you exploit various technologies to raise employee engagement levels and support your company’s digital initiatives? How can you create workspaces that increase employee creativity and enable ad hoc and formal opportunities for collaboration? Be sure to do your homework, as this requires a clear understanding of how people work and what improvements are envisioned. www.tahawultech.com

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INSIGHT

Clint Boulton, CIO

Metrics Use analytics to calculate IT, HR and business metrics and create a digital scorecard. For example, you can gauge user engagement to tracking daily active users and time spent in collaboration software such as Slack.

Try to quantify positive impacts on workforce effectiveness, employee agility and employee satisfaction and retention, information you can use later to assess change management and refine your approach. Digital business metrics are among the hardest to calculate but they are essential to gauging the value of your investments.

Employee experience Improving customer service is the end goal of a digital workplace but you have to bolster the employee experience first. Rally your IT troops and work with real estate and facilities managers to create smart workspaces that enhance collaborative work activities, as well as providing spaces for individual concentration. Create an online portal where managers can

Workplace tools should mimic the ease of use of Uber and Airbnb and the social aspects of Facebook and Instagram.

recognise employee contributions and success and incorporate it into a shared IT/HR metric to monitor employee engagement.

Organisational change Digital workplace initiatives typically require considerable change to internal processes, departmental structures, incentives, skills, culture and behaviours. Assess the new skills and competencies required for the digital workplace and develop a plan to train or hire personnel who possess them. You’ll want to identify change management leaders who can anticipate and mitigate obstacles before they become problems. Integrate digital workplace technologies into workflows and set rules, such as technology standards, usage guidelines, information governance and best practices. Work with senior executives to get them to listen to and engage with employees.

Processes More likely than not you’ll find yourself re-engineering business processes.

First take a close look at how employees currently work and what activities they spend the most time on. Use a customer journey-mapping playbook to mirror employee journey maps by collecting and analysing data linked to employee activities and experiences. Consider emerging technologies, such as internet of things and artificial intelligence. For example, a sensor-rich smart building can track workspace usage patterns and adjust lighting and HVAC settings according to employees’ preset preferences. Use AI to automate toilsome, routine tasks to make employees more productive.

Information Workers want software for searching,

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sharing and consuming information to be as ‘smart’ and compelling as the ones they use in their personal lives.

They want information and analytics to be contextualised and delivered in the moment of need. In that vein, you’ll want to implement a file-sharing system that enables easy mobile access and real-time synchronisation.

Consider virtual assistants that can provide contextualised content recommendations, decision support and advice. Weigh the value of roving robotic video conferencing systems and immersive, 360-degree video conferencing systems. A little sci-fi can go a long way with your digitallyempowered workforce.

Technology Most people aren’t doing this effectively. “Most organisations have a haphazard architecture that has largely been driven by their digital workplace vendors,” Rozwell says. You need to tie all of the digital platforms together in a seamless mesh of contextual awareness, mobility and real-time information delivery that enables employees to serve customers. Facilitate cloud and mobile-first strategies, starting with a cloud-based office suite. Create a “bring your own work style” culture, enabled by smart workspaces. It’s also important to reward technology innovation practices.

This is just a blueprint; execution is everything. Rozwell says digital workplace programs fail for various reasons, such as a lack of attention to organisational change issues, an overemphasis on technology, and focus on the wrong questions. She is frustrated by CIOs frequently asking her what “productivity bump” they can expect from building a digital workplace. “Productivity is a vague and abstract notion,” Rozwell says. www.tahawultech.com

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INSIGHT

Brian P. Watson, CIO

WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES Former JPMorgan Chase CIO Dana Deasy has faced more calamities over the course of his career than practically any CIO. Brian P. Watson explores how technology leaders can use his advice in tackling the most severe of IT crises.

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very CIO deals with systems outages and cyber-attacks.

But geopolitical threats, disasters and loss of life are inconceivable to many.

Dana Deasy, who retired as CIO of global banking giant JPMorgan Chase last month, has experienced all of those, and more.

However, most of those crises had little or nothing to do with technology itself. “If I go over my 30-year career, the vast majority of things I’ve been involved with and have had issues behind them have not been cyberrelated,” Deasy said in a recent interview. “They’ve been a whole bunch of other interesting things – many of which you could have never predicted.”

The lessons Deasy learned from those calamities are instructive for all 54

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IT and business leaders – particularly in a time when, no matter how confident they might be about their systems, operations and cybersecurity, they must expect to endure some form of crisis, and at any given time.

In the 2017 State of the CIO study, 19 percent of IT leaders said managing IT crises was a considerable part of their job. Respondents were also asked which areas they would like to spend more time on in the next three to five years. Not surprisingly, only six percent cited IT crisis management.

But the crises they likely had in mind are commonplace. Think project failures, supplier issues, systems outages. These are all issues that CIOs should be prepared to deal with, Deasy said. Crises are something different. “To me, a crisis is the thing

that sometimes isn’t directly in your line of sight, yet you find yourself in the middle of,” he said. “Disasters, of course, are the wild variable.”

Deasy encountered his first crisis when he worked in the space systems division at Rockwell International (now part of Boeing). Seven days before the launch of a space shuttle, there was a telecommunications problem. Deasy, who was responsible for technology systems associated with the launch, had to notify mission control that the shuttle might not be able to take off on time. “I had to think, would I be the one responsible for having to say we can’t launch a space shuttle?” Deasy said. “That was a wake-up call.”

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INSIGHT

Brian P. Watson, CIO

January 1986, the Challenger – a space shuttle built and maintained

by Rockwell – blew apart a little more than a minute into its tenth launch, killing all seven crew members aboard.

Deasy had experienced his fair share of issues by then, but the scale of the tragedy played a significant role in his development as a leader.

“It’s very different when the role that technology may or may not have played in the problem is not clear,” Deasy said. “In those situations, we have to deal with a whole different set of problems.”

Then there was BP. In April 2010, about halfway through his six-year tenure as CIO at the global oil giant, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred.

Reflecting on these and other crises he has experienced, Deasy focused on a simple truth: “There was no playbook for the day the oil spill occurred,” Deasy said. “There was no playbook for the day the Challenger happened.”

Spotting the warning signs When people ask Deasy what keeps him up at night, he points to balance.

CIOs are constantly moving from issue to issue – be it focusing on innovation, managing operations or mitigating risk.

CIOs, he said, need to juggle all of those balls in the air, paying close attention to all factors to anticipate when problems might arise, and “looking around corners” to recognise new opportunities or threats. “I think any good CIO today has to have an early radar system that hopefully lets them know when one of those things is starting to become problematic, or to see signs where things are starting to break around you,” he said.

When crises do occur, Deasy offered the following steps for CIOs: 1. Focus on the problem at hand IT leaders must communicate with their C-suite colleagues and board members. “Absolute transparency,” Deasy recommends. “Here’s what we 56

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A crisis sometimes isn’t directly in your line of sight, yet you find yourself in the middle of it. know, and here’s everything we don’t know.” But they must balance that with the importance of remediating the problem. Solve the problem first, then go after the root cause(s).

2. Lead from the front A mentor of Deasy’s from Rockwell once told him, “When something goes terribly wrong, it’s how you show up at the beginning that sets the tone.” If leaders are scattered and constantly changing directions, the team will respond with similar disarray. But if CIOs remain poised and calm – despite maybe churning on the inside – “it’s amazing how quickly people will get focused,” Deasy said.

3. Understand your own limitations “Be very clear to yourself and your team that you’re not the smartest

person in the room,” Deasy suggests.

Teams expect leaders to maintain their composure, but also to ask the right questions and bring the right people into the room. But they err when they think they have all the answers. “Sometimes people find themselves in the middle of a crisis and because they’re the senior person in the room, they feel that they need to carry all the expertise,” Deasy added.

4. Seek solutions from all players Even if you have truly put the right people in the right roles, don’t limit them to those responsibilities when a crisis occurs. When leaders break down those silos, and respect the knowledge of their teams, they can find the right answers – sometimes from the least likely sources.

5. Balance people and priorities Often, when a crisis occurs, everyone wants to work on it. But IT leaders must be careful to ensure that day-to-day operations continue through the crisis.

At the same time, team members can burn out when dealing with a protracted crisis situation. “You have to be cognizant that the human mind and physical stamina only go so far,” Deasy said. “How do you ensure that, as people are getting ready to take a break, that you’re actually creating continuity in cycling in other employees?” www.tahawultech.com

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INSIGHT

Alexander Linden, research vice president, Gartner

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE Gartner’s research vice president Alexander Linden on why IT leaders must walk a fine line between embracing and overplaying AI technologies’ role in delivering value for digital business.

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ype isn’t always a bad thing.

Within limits, it fosters attention, investment and innovation. A little bit of hype can build excitement about potential, while too much leads to false hopes and misguided planning assumptions.

Right now, the myths surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) are rampant.

For now, most organisations’ commitments are tentative and more oriented towards experimenting and learning, rather than trying to transform their enterprise or industry as fast as they can.

Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must walk a fine line between embracing and overplaying AI technologies’ role in delivering value for digital business.

Leaders shouldn’t trust any of the myths and hype around AI. Instead, they must become centres of expertise if they are going to educate senior business executives on the real benefits - and shortcomings - of AI. Don’t be fooled into believing the technologies are more capable than they really are. Investing under deceptive pretences can lead to unsatisfactory results and, worst case, career failures.

Currently, plenty of myths surround AI. Here are five of the top misconceptions: 58

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Myth 1: Buy an AI to solve your problems Reality: There is no such thing as “an AI.” Enterprises don’t need “an AI.” They need business results in which AI technologies may play a role. AI is a collection of technologies that can be used in applications, systems and solutions to add specific functional capabilities. Organisations should select best-fit, best-of-breed AI technologies to meet targeted business needs.

Myth 2: Everyone needs a chief AI officer Reality: AI is a loose collection of many technologies, and although they will become pervasive and increase in capabilities for the foreseeable future, focus instead on business results that these emerging technologies can enhance. AI will affect all C-level roles.

Myth 3: Artificial intelligence is real Reality: “AI” has become a generalised marketing term, often with little substance or value. Very useful, specific functions have been created (such as speech and image recognition, game playing, fraud and failure prediction), but no general intelligence is in sight. The concept

of “intelligence” is an overrated generalisation that leads to imprecise thinking. Be specific. Look for specific functional capabilities that drive a desired business result.

Myth 4: AI technologies define their own goals Reality: People define goals; technologies execute them.

Technologies (whether AI or not) do not have their own goals that they seek to achieve. Machines execute the programmes they have been fed, whether the programmes consist of code, data or both. In AI, goal-seeking is an illusion programmed in by people.

Myth 5: AI has human characteristics Reality: AI developers use advanced analytics, special algorithms and large bodies of data to deceive people into believing that their product learns on its own and understands, thinks and empathises with the user. Management (and others) will continue to unconsciously anthropomorphise technologies.

Don’t be fooled into believing the technologies are more capable than they really are, because investing under deceptive pretences can lead to unsatisfactory results. www.tahawultech.com

INSIGHT

Luc Serviant, vice president, Middle East and Africa, Orange Business Services

A NEW BREED

Luc Serviant, vice president, Middle East and Africa, Orange Business Services discusses how in the age of digital transformation, the first point of change must be the CIO.

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e can all see it with our own eyes, but now it’s official. The UAE is ready for change; KPMG’s 2017 Change Readiness Index (CRI) ranked the UAE third globally (from the 136 countries ranked) across three capabilities – government (rank 2), enterprise (1), and people and civil society (17). Within the enterprise sector, the UAE ranked 1 for infrastructure, 2 for technology infrastructure, and 3 for innovation and R&D. While this represents outstanding recognition, we can now see the evidence all around us as Dubai rapidly transforms into the world’s smartest city. Enterprises must keep pace and they know it; this doesn’t mean incremental change, but rapid and radical change.

Survival of the quickest According to the findings of SAP’s July 2017 Digital Transformation Executive Study (supported by 60

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The CIO is pivotal to the transformation process, and they face an increasingly complex task.

Oxford Economics), 84 percent of global companies agree that digital transformation is critical to their survival (survival - not growth and development) in the next five years – but only 3 percent have completed company-wide transformation efforts. Talk is obviously cheap

but inertia is a concern, especially when you consider that digital transformation was cited as a top-three driver of future revenue across all industries and all types and sizes of companies. The benefits of digital transformation are becoming apparent – the study says that digital leaders already enjoying higher market share and profits and expect to see strong revenue growth as ROI on their transformation commitments and investments.

But who leads the digital transformation process and how do you organise a fundamental and complex change management process across an entire organisation? Where does it start and end, how does it start and how is it managed? How do you know it’s working? What technologies do you adopt to enable this digital transformation and how do you integrate these effectively? www.tahawultech.com

INSIGHT

Luc Serviant, vice president, Middle East and Africa, Orange Business Services

There are some clues in the SAP study; digital leaders see digital transformation as truly transformational; they focus on customer-facing functions first; they focus on talent (it’s all about people); and they invest in nextgeneration technologies.

Leader of the pack The CIO is pivotal to this transformation process, and they face an increasingly complex task.

CIO’s 16th (2017) State of the CIO survey shows that the role is itself transforming rapidly, from the core traditional role of network, IT and systems security, to leading the digital transformation process with an emphasis on winning customers and driving revenue, innovation and collaboration. Seventy-two percent of CIOs surveyed admitted their struggle to balance business innovation and operational excellence, while 87 percent said the CIO role is more challenging than ever.

The good news is that 62 percent of CIOs surveyed said they are not feeling overwhelmed and actually find the job more rewarding than before. It’s just as well that IT leaders find the dual role satisfying because the transformational and functional responsibilities are now part of the job.

Remember: digital transformation is not a short-term operational challenge or a technology project.

It’s clear from the study that CIOs are spending more time on transformational activities such as aligning IT initiatives with business goals (53 percent) and cultivating the IT-business partnership (38 percent).

When CIOs look ahead, the bi-modal role shift becomes more dramatic: CIO respondents expect to spend 7 percent of their time on functional duties, compared to 20 percent currently. The bimodal 62

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role means that CIOs are part of the business leadership team (not just function leaders) with the dual role of establishing and maintaining operational excellence and security, combined with innovation and business impact (more retained customers and revenue).

For example, in the retail sector across the Middle East, we see more interaction between the CIO and the CMO, as digital customer engagement moves towards the centre of the overall strategy for growth. The customer relationship is at the heart of the retail experience focusing on engagement, payments, logistics and communications.

Digital business transformation is essentially a technology-enabled people and process transformation, but what technologies are CIOs adopting to help them enable, drive, support and sustain the transformation?

The CIO study suggests that emerging technologies like AI and internet of things (IoT), AR and VR, wearables are still relatively small components of the company IT budget.

This will change quickly as digital transformation gains momentum and the CIO must master a new set of skills and technologies, transform themselves first, lead the development of their own department, and the wider company.

The ‘Super CIO’ So, what must this new breed of CIO do to succeed?

Given that the role of IT is being transformed as drastically as the rest of the enterprise, one challenge will be the set of new ICT skills – data analytics, security, application development, mobile and enterprise architecture - that are in increasing demand. The IT business unit must

Digital transformation is not a shortterm operational challenge, nor is it a technology project.

be seen as an enabler and driver of – and not a barrier to – digital transformation.

Silos have to go, and management must accept the central role of IT within the business, while the CIO has to earn this trust and credibility.

The transformational CIO must be skilled in building cross function relationships, collaboration, influence, and foster good team working – all high-level management and leadership skills; as well as an advocate and evangeliser of digital transformation.

In the new dual role of the CIO, the old IT job spec remains – network, security, systems, application architecture – and a readiness to engage with everything from BYOD to Big Data means CIO budgets are stretched, staff are hard to find and expertise is hard to keep.

The UAE is ready for digital transformation, and it’s a tough assignment for CIOs who are increasingly looking for experienced ‘digital partners’ to help guide and support them. Change needs leadership, but transformational change demands a new type of leader. www.tahawultech.com

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INSIGHT

Massimo Ferrari, management strategy director, Red Hat

Red Hat’s management strategy director Massimo Ferr explores why automating processes within the enterprise can bring stability and smoothness to the CIO.

THE

VALUE OF

Red Hat’s management strategy director Massimo Ferrari explores why automating processes within the enterprise can bring stability and smoothness to the CIO.

M

any enterprises in the Middle East have now reached a stage where managing the scale of their IT infrastructures is becoming a challenge second only to increasing the speed of provisioning.

A broad spectrum of technologies, solutions, processes, and skillsets is available to help manage a large-scale environment. Among management technologies, automation is one of the most powerful.

Automation is not merely a technology choice. First and foremost, it’s a business choice.

Without automation, supporting the growth of your business can be increasingly complex, to the point of becoming impossible beyond a certain scale. If it’s true that software is eating the world, as the well-known venture capitalist Marc Andreessen 64

OCTOBER 2017

said in 2011, and if it’s true that every company is becoming a technology company, as the chief of research at Gartner said in 2013, then automation becomes a must-have tool in the hands of the business, not just of the IT organisation.

Less waste: automation optimises IT operations Highways are a good analogy for this. When the population in a geographical area grows, the government is forced to develop the infrastructure to support the additional cars. In some places, these highways must be equipped with toll gateways to regulate access, and toll gateways must be operated by humans, each performing thousands of repetitive operations per day.

In turn, the newly built highways attract even more citizens in the

region, and more cars on the road.

The government can deal with the spike in traffic either by adding more gateways and hiring new people to manage them, or it can make the existing highways more efficient by implementing automated barriers and automated access systems.

Electronic tolls enable more cars to access the highway in the same amount of time that human operators take: by eliminating the brief stop at the toll and the interaction between the driver and the human operator or the cash machine, automation allows each car to move through the toll at a higher speed, in less time.

In the same way, IT automation can help your operations team to manage more workloads over the same working hours, reducing the need to hire more staff to support the growth of the infrastructure. www.tahawultech.com

rari e

INSIGHT

Massimo Ferrari, management strategy director, Red Hat

Less complexity: automation orchestrates sophisticated services In modern cars, the transmission is managed by a computer which operates the gearbox and the clutch, coordinating them with engine, brakes, wheels and many other components. Automating the gear shifting task reduces the amount of work required to drive because it simplifies the entire process.

The simplification introduced by the automated transmission is particularly useful when a certain aspect of driving must be repeated over and over. For example, thanks to automation, the continual operation of accelerating, stopping and reaccelerating when stuck in traffic during rush hour doesn’t require the driver to shift gears endless times.

Like the automatic transmission in your car, an automation tool is designed to deal with a large number of moving parts at the same time, taking care of repetitive tasks and keeping all the pieces together while delivering predictable results.

Less mistakes: automation reduces human error Even the most talented member of your IT operations team is human, and humans are prone to mistakes.

The larger and more complex an environment, the higher the chances for mistakes. For example, largescale environments easily force the IT organisation to deal with time, pressure and stress. The psychological stress comes from the realisation that a task, even a simple one, can’t be accomplished across all the managed machines in the allocated amount of time with a low probability of errors.

It must be also considered that growing complexity leads to more articulated operations that need to be performed. Highly complex tasks 66

OCTOBER 2017

Like the automatic transmission in your car, an automation tool is designed to deal with a large number of moving parts at the same time.

require constant focus and precision – skills that not all team members may possess.

Back to our car analogy.

The autopilot feature recently introduced by Tesla is a good example of how automation can assist humans and help them to avoid mistakes.

Driving is certainly a complex task yet manageable by humans. Automation here, while not yet perfect, can be two times more reliable than human drivers.

Less uncertainty: automation prepares you for the future As an abstraction layer interconnecting many elements on the enterprise IT and operating at scale with minimal effort, automation can be seen as an extensible platform that can evolve and adapt to market changes.

Automation as a platform builds upon the foundational elements

you already have in your computing environment, simplifying the evolution of existing services and the creation of completely new ones.

For example, automation can simplify the deployment of existing applications across new public and private cloud infrastructures that don’t exist today.

In another example, automation can make it easier to combine new IT components, like a new identity and access management service, with existing ones, to help create new offerings at a fraction of the time otherwise required to re-engineer the whole stack from scratch.

Let’s take the automatic gearbox analogy to another level.

Think about a highway with a long queue of cars progressing at a very low, tedious speed. To reduce the annoyance of driving in queues, several manufacturers introduced a technology called adaptive cruise control. ACC uses information from sensors like radars and cameras to instruct the car’s control systems to automatically follow the vehicle in front, adjusting speed and stopping when necessary.

The development of such technology, exactly as for the autopilot, has been possible thanks to the automation of several car components, pioneered by automatic transmission. In this example, automatic transmission is a key building block for car innovation.

Automation is not just a great tool to deal with today’s market demands, but can also be a fundamental building block to help sustain the growth and evolution of your business tomorrow.

It is just one of the many technological, operational, and cultural elements that you may need to introduce in your organisation as part of a digital transformation journey. Automation alone is not enough. www.tahawultech.com

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Launches and releases

Brand: Apple Product: iPhone X

Brand: Microsoft Product: Surface Pro Microsoft has launched its enhanced Surface Pro device in the UAE, equipped with Windows 10 creativity and productivity features.

Surface Pro has been reengineered to suit the needs of consumers as well as professionals from a variety of fields from artists, engineers and architects to teachers and doctors.

The new Surface Pro’s battery allows users to keep working for up to 13.5 hours in front of a 12.3-inch PixelSense Display.

The device comes in various configurations, from the Intel Core m3 with 4GB RAM and 128GB of SSD storage, to the Intel Core i7 with 16 GB RAM and 1TB of SSD storage.

The Surface Pro Signature Type Cover, according to Microsoft, is designed for optimum portability and convenience, wrapped in Alcantara material that comes in various colours, including Platinum, Burgundy and Cobalt Blue.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: The device has been optimised for Windows Hello and Microsoft Office 365, with new inking features in Word, Excel and PowerPoint designed to work the new Surface Pen. The new Surface Pen now has 4,096 points of pressure sensitivity with tilt, and “virtually imperceptible”.

68

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The iPhone X, pronounced ‘iPhone 10,’ comes with thin bezel and an edge-to-edge 5.8-inches diagonally OLED screen. It’s got a resolution of 2436×1125 with a pixel density of 458 ppi, which Apple calls Super Retina.

Apple also removed the Home button for the new device.

It supports HDR, wide color, 3D Touch, and True Tone for adjusting the white balance of the display to match the ambient lighting.

Under the hood, iPhone X sports an A11 Bionic chip, which Apple says is 70 percent faster than the A10 Fusion in the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. It has six cores, two for highperformance computing that are 25 percent faster, and four efficiency cores to save battery life during lower-intensity tasks.

Apple designed its own three-core GPU with 3GB RAM that’s up to 30

percent faster than the GPU in the iPhone 7.

The new device has a 7MP TrueDepth camera on the front and a vertical 12MP dual-lens back camera.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: iPhone X is equipped with a TrueDepth camera-andsensor system to enable users to unlock it via its new facial recognition feature, FaceID. A new feature in Messages called Animoji can mimic your mood and expression. It tracks 50 facial muscles to sync the emoji even when you’re talking and lets you send your “talking head” to a friend.

Apple will take preorders for the iPhone X starting 27th October, and the phones ship 3rd November. iPhone X starts at $999 for 64GB of storage (the highest starting price of any iPhone to date), with a 256GB upgrade.

Brand: Trriple Product: Trriple mWallet Trriple is a “first-of-its-kind” mWallet application targeted at individual consumers and businesses alike. A full payment and savings service delivered through a mobile app, Trriple allows customers to be in “complete control” of their finances in an “easy and convenient way”, and claims to be the only cash-funded mWallet.

Trriple delivers experiences through all customer touch points, both electronically and physically. It grants the freedom to perform payments, set up savings goals, pay bills, along with many other services. It’s a money manager that helps users analyse their spending patterns and budgets.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: Tripple has a “friendly, simple” look and feel which is “fun to use”. A clean and simple navigation process makes it easy to scroll through various in-app features and to perform various transactions.

Every transaction through the Trriple mWallet generates a unique code and can only be used for a single purchase or transaction. Trriple brings “best-inindustry” security features to its app. www.tahawultech.com

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CHAI IN THE SKY

I

ncase Dubai’s app-centric, deliveranything lifestyle didn’t already cater for a nation with impeccable standards of service, Costa Coffee just took it one step further. The coffee house has just completed its first delivery of takeaway drinks using drone technology to a bunch of sun worshippers on Jumeirah’s Kite Beach.

There are various gaping flaws in this show pony of a trial. Today, there are over 150 Costa outlets in the UAE – a country renowned for its love affair with record-breaking skyscrapers. In order for Costa’s drones to successfully navigate this urban landscape, even in low-rise areas, the company will need an army of qualified drone pilots – and they don’t come cheap.

Globally, the market for piloted drones is forecast to more than double by 2022 and become a $4.37 billion 70

OCTOBER 2017

business per year, while drone pilots in the US reportedly earn between $80,000-$100,000 a year. That cost will have to come out of Costa’s pocket, which aims to be offset by coffee sales – all of which will be delivered by drone.

While Costa hasn’t specified plans to deliver hot drinks using this service, and has currently only mentioned the delivery of its ‘Frostino’ and ‘Cold Brew’ range, this is a service they plan to launch in the desert. I’m far from convinced that my ice-cold Coffee Cooler will be in any fit state after being airlifted through the blistering summer heat. It certainly won’t be the “instant blast of cool refreshment” that Costa claims it will.

Should Costa think about introducing hot drinks to this service – perish the thought – we’re all in trouble. Our affection for a cool breeze will soon end

when scolding hot coffee comes raining down from the derailed ‘Coffee-Copter’.

Another thing: the promotional video shows a customer calling the Costa branch to place her order. I’d love to know how she conveyed her location to the barista without the use of coordinates or a dropped Google Maps pin. The UAE’s lack of address system is often a cause of confusion, and becomes even harder when you throw flying couriers into the mix.

Overall, this venture will probably never amount to more than a bit of harmless fun, but let’s not be fooled: this is a gimmick, and technology for the sake of it.

Who knows, maybe Costa can trick gullible coffee-lovers into believing that if a blonde beach babe can summon her order via drone technology, then so can they. www.tahawultech.com

ONE ENGINEERING CLUB’S UNIQUE RACE FOR CLEAN ENERGY T H E E X C E P T I O N A L S T O R Y O F PAT R I C E R O L L A N D

For 25 years, the ThinkPad has been the go-to hardware for the world’s most ambitious people. Like Patrice Rolland, a software engineer from Montreal who amazingly harnesses the wind to drive eco-friendly vehicle design. With his team, he has built wind-powered cars in the Netherlands all designed, produced and controlled by one central brain, the ThinkPad. At Lenovo, we work every day to innovate and improve tomorrow’s ThinkPad - to give every ThinkPerson the right tool to match their ambition.

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