BIC, Al Sakhir: Eight specialized workshops kicked-off on Tuesday as part of the Bahrain International eGovernment Forum 2015 activities held under the patronage of His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Supreme Committee for Information and Communication Technology. Parallel to the Bahrain IT Expo 2015, the workshops will continue till 19th March, 2015.
After the inauguration of the IT Expo, His Highness Shaikh Mohammed visited a number of the workshops, observing them in process. The workshops included international speakers who touched upon topics and trends related to the field of ICT.
Stephen Jio, Global Social Media Marketing Manager at Dell and Creative Manager at Alienware Gaming Products, conducted the ‘Social Media – Business Innovation’ workshop. “Today’s workshop covered social media strategies, examined demographics, participants took the opportunity to understand where they need to be when developing their social media strategy, branding and building their objectives which should align with the brand and what the business wants to accomplish,” he said.
The workshop wrapped-up with participants aligning their strategies, goals and demographics with the channels they would concentrate on.
CEO and President of Innovation Institute of America, Alexander Blass, conducted a masterclass workshop entitled ‘Secrets of Business Innovation and Innovative Entrepreneurship: How to Lead, Create, Market, and Sell like an Innovator’, which stressed on innovative business strategies, trends, ICT tools, methods, and frameworks. The workshop also included international case studies that provided a blueprint for success from various industries.
‘Big Data – Future and Challenges’ workshop was characterized by interaction where the speaker Shantanu Chandra, Consultant in the Financial Services and IT Risk PwC, began with a broad introduction to the concept of Big Data and discussed in depth the challenges of IT. The participants in this interactive workshop went through a number of big data models. The workshops of day three also reviewed in details the responsibilities of CEOs, ICEs and ICT teams in the digital world. Chandra stressed the potentials and importance of big data for companies and public sector.
Donald Smith, Founder of Future Smith, conducted a workshop on ‘Holistic Business Process Management (BPM): Improvement to Transformation’. “At the workshop today, I clarified how setting the background for business process management is so important. We discussed the history, influential thinkers and the maturity in the business process world; as well as demonstrated the difference between improvement and transformation,” Smith, said.
Vice President of ISACA, Vittal Raj, led the workshop under the topic ‘Building Defensible Critical Information Infrastructure’. “In today’s organizations, there are vast information systems – many of them are interconnected and complex. Governments which deliver citizen services have significant amount of automation happening. Today’s workshop gives an introduction of what cybercrime and cyber security is about, it also offers participants the principals of building defensible information systems,” he said.
At the eGovernment Authority’s (eGA) workshop entitled ‘eGovernment Success Stories’ capitalizes on social abilities for readiness for smarter cities where ICT experts discussed a number of leading initiatives and experiences from the GCC and EU. They also covered the challenges in the field of smart cities particularly within the Arab region.
Salem Al Hosani – Acting Director at UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority – talked about the success story of the UAE.
Another key speaker participated at the eGovernment Success Stories was Dr. Elias Tragos – researcher in the Telecommunications and Networks Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas – focused on IT security, privacy and smart city application based on internet of things. He demonstrated a number of European models and smart city data as he stressed the importance of coordination, data and programs exchange.
Electronics and Telecommunication Engineer, Swanand Umaranikar, highlighted the globally recognized agile certification PMI-ACP during the ‘PMI – Agile Certified Practitioner’ workshop. “After attending today’s workshop, participants will be aware of the basic agile methodology; the principles and philosophy behind why and how it will work along with why they should change from behavior and invention perspective in order for them to adapt these new practices and implement them in their work place. They will also learn that smart cities are a good example of delivering factors that serve customers, and this is the very role of eGovernments,” Umaranikar, said.
While Adam Kulach, Ambassador Head of Delegation of the European Union (EU) to the Bahrain, Oman, KSA, Kuwait, and Qatar regions, ran a workshop on the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ‘Horizon 2020’. The only one-day workshop welcomed senior officials from Bahrain, the GCC and EU.
Lastly, Choo Zhi Min, Consultant at Service Innovation Practice held a session on System Design and User-Experience. “Today’s topics cover the first stage of user-experience design which is the users’ research and different materials such as contextual enquiry and focus group that are discussed throughout the workshop,” Min, said.