Oracle Hosts CIO Executive Dinner Discussion on ‘Your Roadmap to the Future’ in Islamabad

The group attending the CIO Executive Dinner Discussion hosted by Oracle in Islamabad

On the evening of the 26th of August, CIOs and IT heads gathered at the CIO Executive Dinner Discussion hosted by Oracle at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad. Part of a tri-city series event to talk about the organizations’ “Roadmap to the Future”, Business-Technology leaders shared insights into challenges of creating aligned business and technology strategies along with dealing with a risk averse economic climate.

After holding a similar discussion in Karachi a day earlier, CIO magazine invited Business-Technology decision-makers in Pakistan’s capital to talk about what some of their most pertinent challenges were, and what they viewed the roadmap for their respective organizations or industry verticals was for the next 5 years.

Every CIO has his own vision of the future and though each professional participating in the forum has a separate vision to share, the objective that everyone has, is pretty much the same: implement technology that is well aligned to make the business more efficient and productive.

While Director of Pearl Pharmaceuticals, Humayun Latif’s concerns revolved around the affordability of ERP solutions for the Small and Medium Enterprise, CIO of the First MicroFinance Bank of Pakistan, Sadiq Shahbaz’s prime concern was cost cutting at the CapEx and looking towards solutions that will help implement solutions such as Branchless Banking.

The Deputy Director IT at COMSATS, Abdul Rehman Saeed spoke about needing to learn more about IAAS and SAAS that they could forward to their own customers through a private Cloud, something that Ufone and Telcos have already implemented.

The discussion revolved around needing to establish long term relationships with vendors so as to be able to bring more than just a comprehensive solution for the organization – but to be able to get involved with companies during their Business Strategy development stage.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning along with Best Practices for the general upkeep of Information Security, were all part of the discussion. Baber Majid Bhatti from NTC also brought on an interesting discussion as to how technology will grow in terms of market size and users if it embedded into the social uplift of the community.

The CIO Executive Dinner Discussion in Islamabad was attended by CIOs along with Ahsen Javed, MD Pakistan and South West Asia at Oracle Corporation  and Rizwan Munawar, Country Head – Applications Business. Pakistan & SAGE-W, Oracle Corporation and their respective team members.

Videos and a more detailed post to follow at the end of the tri-city series.

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