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

On the evening of the 24th of August, 34 CIOs and IT heads gathered at the CIO Executive Dinner Discussion hosted by Oracle at the PC Hotel in Karachi. 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.

Whether or not technology actually enables organizations to reduce costs is always a topic that yields interesting responses simply because of the overall technology integration within each sector. As Rasool Hoodbhoy, Head of IT operations HBL says, “Of course this differs from sector to sector, however most companies look at what their competition is doing before they plan their own DR. If, let’s say, their competition will be down for 5 days, the company may not invest in technology that will give it zero downtime.. Perhaps they may implement a solution that will enable them to resume operations in 3 days and still give them a 2-day headstart on their competition.”

Information Security was also identified as one of the areas that will crop up on the organizational roadmap in the next one year. However, Faisal Anwar, CIO at KASB Bank says, “Not necessarily. Unless it is a more mature organization working in an information-sensitive industry, IS is probably not going to be that important as, let’s say, laying out the infrastructure or dealing with backup and archiving of systems.”

Arshad Siddiqui, Head of IT at IBA shared insights about how his academic institution has mapped many components of its business strategy based on its technology strategy. “Our objective is to realize IBA’s standing in the top institutions of the world and work aggressively and closely with the various departments across the management to ensure that happens.”

More of the discussion turned towards whether Cloud Computing, SAAS, PAAS were really viable options for local enterprises. As companies identified specific issues they were exploring solutions for, Oracle positioned specific solutions that could make business sense for the organizations.

While the videos for the sessions will be up shortly for you to see, it will be interesting to conduct a comparative analysis on Dinner Discussions in Islamabad and Lahore and see where Pakistani Business-Technology leaders are headed and what their future roadmap looks like.

Stay tuned!

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