Decision-Makers Forum ‘CIO Majlis’ To Expand Across GCC

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Swaminathan Balasubramanian

The leading association of IT decision-makers CIOMajlis was started in December 2015 with about 15 members. Today, close to 250 members the forum is a Premium IT forum in the Middle East. The unique aspect of the forum is it is only for executive and senior-level IT decision-makers in an end-user environment in the United Arab Emirates. Therefore, Vendors and solution providers are excluded helps them maintain sanity in the forum. In an exclusive chat, Ahmad Almulla, Chairman of CIO Majlis speaks on the business dynamics in the Middle East and how companies are charting their growth strategy using technology.

 What are the unique aspects of the CIOMajlis which makes your forum different from other forums?

There are many aspects of the CIOMajlis that are unique.

• We are not for profit forum.
• Membership is by invitation only and is for senior and executive-level professionals in IT. It covers all industries and verticals.
• There are no membership fees
• Our activities are well planned and scheduled for the full year. Our board is only CIOs and our slogan is: From CIOs to CIOs. Agendas, topics, activities are all based on CIO’s interests.
• We do engage many other interested parties (i.e. Vendors, regulatory authorities, government, educational institutes and more)
• We are independent of any party be it a vendor, government, or any other type

What are the regular activities of your forum and how are you ensuring knowledge sharing happens through it?

We have the following activities:

• Monthly sessions: These sessions take place on the fourth Wednesday of the Month and it consists of one of the following:
  • A topic of interest (e.g. Cashless societies, block-chain and more)
  • A case study presented by one the members
  • A site visit to an organization that have done some interesting implementation

• Annual Conference: We run an annual conference, in which, we bring keynote speakers from across the globe, have panel discussions, talk about mega IT projects, and share the learnings from the innovation tours. In this conference, we have no sales pitch, it only has topics of interest to CIOs and the speakers and panelists will be either CIOs, subject matter experts, consultants form independent companies such as Gartner.

• Benchmarking study: We do a benchmarking study across companies in the GCC region to provide regional reference data for CIOs and organizations to support decision making.

• During the holy month of Ramadhan, the session will be an informal gathering over Sehri (Sohour).

• An annual innovation tour: The main purpose of the innovation tours is to learn, share, and engage with other countries that are well known for innovation and are quite advanced in certain aspects of Information Technology.

We Schedule those tours during the last quarter of the year. The tour duration is one week. We select from 15 to 20 CIOs from different industries. Of course, every year, different CIOs join the tour. We do work with foreign embassies and business councils to arrange those visits and gain their support.

Please explain your innovation tours and share some interesting insights from those experiences?

Our first tour was in Oct 2016 and we went to Silicon Valley in the US. We visited about 10 well-known companies in the IT field (i.e Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and more) and they shared with us their strategies, visions, future developments.

In 2017, we visited South Korea and visited companies such as Samsung, Hyundai/Kia, the smart cities. We also spend half a day in a conference called Asia Beat in which many startup companies display their innovations.

Last year, we visited Sweden and Denmark. We have visited some of the well-known names such as Volvo, Ericsson, Maersk, and some Fintech companies. It is interesting to notice that countries are moving quite fast with the usage of technology and this was noticed year after year. Today, governments are taking the lead in adopting technology and moving at a very rapid pace. Certainly, there are a lot of takeaways from these tours. We also share what we are doing here in the UAE and also across industries. It is worth mentioning that we also meet some of the CIOs of companies in those countries and share our issues, concerns  and more.

After interacting with your members in the Majils, what are the three common aspects you notice from your colleagues in terms of digital transformation in their companies?

When it comes to digital transformation, the CIOs face a major challenge and this topic has been discussing many times. Some of the common themes that emerge are:

• Who should own these initiatives (i.e. CEO, business executives, or IT?). The main concern here is that such an initiative will have a huge impact on the business model and processes and, therefore, the business leads should take the front role. In addition, the level of support that such an initiative needs is very high in terms of resources and business involvement.

• Risk – Such initiatives bring with them a very high level of risk. How to identify, mitigate, and deal with such risks. What is interesting is the fact that if you do take such initiative, the risk could be much bigger.

• Change management – There is no doubt that digital transformation brings about many changes to the organization. In order to ensure successful implementation, adequate attention must be paid to training,, skills upgrades and more

What made you ‘Future CIO’ concept and share your experience interacting with the CIOs of tomorrow? 

The concept of “Future CIO” is to encourage the new generation to innovate!!! We are working closely with Universities to introduce an award called “Future CIO Award”. And it will be given to the most innovative project done by senior-level students as part of their graduation project. The award will be a job offer by some of the leading organizations in the UAE.

Moving forward, what are the other key plans for CIOMajlis?

We are looking at expanding our presence to other countries in the GCC region. We will start with Saudi Arabia and Oman. We have received quite a lot of interest from those countries and are well-positioned to move in there. We are also looking at publishing our findings from the sessions on an annual basis. We also are looking at opportunities to interact with similar purpose initiatives in other parts of the world such as the UK/India/Australia/US to share and learn from each other.