Doha: While COVID-19 has disrupted every element of global business, it has also demonstrated the critical importance of digital transformation. As the journey from crisis to recovery gets underway, the enablement of a future enterprise must be the end goal for any successful business discussed, experts during a virtual summit, recently.
International Data Corporation (IDC) hosted this year’s edition of the IDC Qatar CIO (Chief Information Officer) Summit under the theme ‘Innovative Digital Strategies: Evolving to the Demands of a New Reality’. The event brought together senior business leaders, influential IT heads, and industry analysts to share their collective expertise on how best to meet the unique challenges of these unprecedented times.
Muneer Elakhras, Group Head of IT, Qatar General Insurance & Reinsurance Co discussed on the topic entitled ‘The Digital Innovation Era – The Future of Business’, highlighting the main objectives in mind of business and IT leaders about the digital transformation. He said, “In the last few years many leaders, CEOs, business development managers have started to think about the services being digital”.
He noted that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world they became keener and certain that digitisation is must to have otherwise they will lose their business and customer trust.
According to Elakhras the main objectives for digital transformation are mobility across the value chain, modular and automated services, customer-centric and driven products, adaptation of cloud computing, and smart customer touchpoints.
He said “Value-driven business is important because when we start putting the organisation values in the strategy it will benefit in the different organisation levels and reflect positively in the environment. Also building an objective-oriented business will create a self-motivated environment for the users which will lead the digital transformation and increase in productivity from the value driven perspective.”
Fuencisla Merino, Assistant Director IoT Business Commercial, Ooredoo Qatar shed light on the topic ‘Full end-to-end for an effective IoT Digital Transformation’. She said, “Digital transformation has been for a long time synonymous of technology. The digital transformation initiatives, and particularly those related with the Internet of Things (IoT), were carried out by the customer internally but have technical complexities. In many cases the response from customers have been on technical aspects and failure to identify and pursue business objectives. Many customers are turning their focus to external help to achieve business objectives, optimisation and innovation.”
She discussed about Ad-hoc solutions which are tailored solutions for a particular customer. It is a good option at the dawn of IoT but has high on-time fees and recurrent costs and takes long implementation time to market. As a result, customers have turned to companies developing specific use cases, she said.
She said, “We need device integration for IoT which has many advantages because it is a product-based approach with full end-to-end local capabilities and is also evolving. Business customisation phase is important for customers where that product can be customized and we have seen this is working extremely well.”
