Summit Agenda

MC OPENS

WELCOME ADDRESS BY SPONSORS

FEATURED FIRESIDE CHAT: Digital Leadership – Paving Pathways To Progress With Advanced Technologies

• ‘The Digital Imperative’: How solving digital challenges will transform the MENA region to a global powerhouse
• Discussion & progress update on the UAE Digital Economy Strategy which spans 30 initiatives with programs targeting 6 sectors and 5 new areas of growth
• Dialogue on ‘Looking to the Future’ & ‘Shaping the Future’ – What role does Artificial Intelligence (AI) play in revolutionizing economic prosperity and how to leverage its ‘multiplier effect’?
• Strategic update and discussion on the UAE Coders Community & Initiatives

FEATURED FIRESIDE CHAT: Artificial Intelligence (Ai) & The Roadmap To The Digital Realm For The Mena Region

• Adopting the right AI strategy & how can it be positioned as the cornerstone for success in MENA’s government and private sectors?
• Roadmaps to successful rollout of AI technology – striking the balance between social and economic benefits whilst prioritizing collaborative activity on policies and legislation
• Data-based decision making for improved overall outcomes: economic prosperity, social well-being, environmental sustainability, and good governance
• Exploration of case study examining best practices in the implementation of AI technology during the Covid-19 pandemic by the UAE government demonstrating great returns on investment
• Practical implications of data volume availability – how to harness the real abilities of AI technology using only small amounts of data?

Next-Generation Digital Workplaces with Integrated Automation, Cognitive & Advanced Analytics Technology – Incorporating the Backbone for Digital Economies of the Future

• What does a modern worker experience look like? And what does it take to transform your existing experience into an integrated autonomic workplace ecosystem?
• Improving your bottom line by empowering employees to be collaborative, productive, enhancing organizational culture by creating secure employee experiences
• How to use new age technology like cognitive automation, self-healing intelligent technology to create integrated & hybrid workplace models?
• Secured desktop virtualization & workplace collaboration with cloud-native productivity solutions to reduce device management & support costs

The World of Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Cloud: What Role does Intelligent Data Play?

• Modernizing your enterprise architecture and the big move to the cloud with your databases, applications & computing in the cloud – Is enterprise data all that you are left with in hand?
• Your journey to cloud: The significance of understanding your data is the most strategic differentiator
• Innovating across any cloud platform (multi-cloud, multi-hybrid) - exploring how an AI-powered intelligent data management cloud platform can help

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: MENA Governments & Public Sector Industry Discussion

• What are some key trends around Digital Transformation (DX) currently being witnessed across MENA governments & public sector enterprises? How has your data strategy evolved & matured to leverage AI technology capabilities?
• A conversation on investments in data analytics & AI technology for public sector enterprises – how to continue inspiring government leaders in the pursuit of advanced technology possibilities? Are demonstrable real-life scenarios & outcomes helping to drive the mission strategy for your public sector organization?
• Developing new metrics for success & challenging traditional models – have you been able to deploy modern data stacks, data warehousing capabilities, data virtualization or dashboards to make an impact on internal & external end-users?
• What is the right data architecture strategy for your government enterprise?
  • Is bespoke data architecture always a necessity? Or will PaaS (Platform as a Service) and off the shelf solutions be adequate for your needs?
  • Does your strategy include the ability to scale up? What’s the use-case road map at your organization?
  • How important is data governance & ethics for government enterprises? Is there a data steward to prevent reputational risk? Are there processes to mitigate bias and test fairness to ensure ethical outputs?

INTELLIGENT DECISION MAKING: Re-Engineering Your Enterprise Decision Making Processes

• Smart Data -> Real-Time Analytics -> Intelligent Decision Making -> Successful Business Outcomes
• Unified Data Platforms (UDPs) with no limits on data variety, data volume & solution development speed – convenient GUI based systems for all types of enterprise users for transforming data to real business value
• Is it time to bid farewell to Business Intelligence (BI)? Does Decision Intelligence (DI) fulfil the promise with scalable data ingestion, ease-of-use & predictive real-time analytics?
• Competitive decision making for the digital age: contextual, continuous & connected across today’s highly interconnected business ecosystems

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: My Data, My Customer, My Story & My Platform: Customer Experience (CX), Marketing & Predictive Analytics in the MENA region

• Is CX doing enough in today’s world with customer behaviors, habits & priorities continuing to evolve? What can brands do to keep up with all the new tech popping up every quarter? And what role can automation play as part of customer journeys?
• Is unifying customer facing functions the best possible strategy in improving CX standards? How far has the MENA market progressed towards hyper-personalization? Would predictive AI technology work in improving CX?
• All about MarTech – what’s your pick? CDP vs. DMP vs. Hybrid? Customer data platforms: what are some CDP use cases? Would it be best to build vs. buy? What’s the best strategy in deploying CDPs effectively and by when can you expect to see results?
• How do I maximize the return on every marketing dollar that I spend? Does the answer always start with data? Do scalable data warehouses & cloud data stacks represent a solution for digital native organizations whether big or small?
• Quantifying the business impact of CX initiatives & what are some unique regional customer insights?
• How to build a business case for CX improvement at your organization? How to ensure key stakeholders buy-in and remain excited about the impact whilst you define direction & strategy?

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: Cloud Data Security & Resiliency: An Overview of Technologies & Strategies to Help you Anticipate, Protect Against, Withstand & Recover from Cyber-Attacks

• Reinforcing the concept of cyber-resilience – have you personally witnessed the increased frequency of malware attacks with the recent pandemic & shift to hybrid work models?
• Overview of the cyber-threat landscape in the MENA region – are attacks getting more sophisticated? What are some of the attacks associated with IT service continuity for ‘always-on’ enterprises?
• How to go about protecting against the most predominant cloud security breaches like – advanced malware, compromised credentials, misconfiguration of environments, unpatched vulnerabilities, insider threats & zero-day vulnerabilities?
• What are some of the best practices whilst revising your IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM) framework? How to prioritize strategies to increase awareness, proactivity & readiness?
• Are Zero Trust Services the best bet to protect business critical data using strict access authentication to keep malicious insider threats and advanced outsider attacks at bay?
• Disaster Recovery – Is it possible to leverage intelligent automation to accelerate response times & reliable recovery using automated patterns?

Shifting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Workloads to the Cloud: Modernizing, Migrating, Securing & Managing Business Critical Applications

• Why is it imperative to simplify the management of complex, hybrid architectures and systems across multi-cloud environments? Can you transform the development of new products, build-up of new skills, lower costs & mitigate platform risks all at the same time?
• Managed services on the cloud – do you really have the expertise to DIY? Are you confident that your data & workload will be secure? Is there a risk of losing control over one of the key workloads? And are you worried about increases to topline cost?
• Does it make sense to migrate intensive SAP & Oracle application workloads? How to make sense of the best options for flexibility & composability on the market with such a wide variety – Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud & Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Exploring Cloud Journeys: Analyzing Best Practice Use Cases in the Transition from On-Prem -> Single Cloud -> Hybrid Cloud -> Multi-Cloud

• Public Cloud: Easy come & easy go choices with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud & Ali Baba Cloud – no CAPEX, no maintenance, good scalability & reliability
• Larger MENA based enterprises for whom Public Cloud might not be the right choice due to low visibility / control, regional compliance risks & cost concerns associated with scale – what is the preferred alternative?
• Understanding future trends & technical innovation driving the next generation of intelligent multi-cloud data platforms

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: The Human Factor: People & Workforce Strategies to Succeed in the World of Metaverse, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Business Intelligence

• Talent Pooling: Does it work? Is it always necessary to hire a data-scientist vs. training one from within the ranks? And Is hiring a consultant the right choice for my organization?
• Are people the biggest barriers to change? Workforce strategies to help dispel myths & using disruption as an effective tool within your organization
• What are some effective methods to bring diversity and inclusion to your team? What does it take to have a strong and successful data analytics workforce?
• Leadership lessons: How can you as a Data / AI practice leader be wary of global scenarios to sense and respond to societal change? How relevant are issues related to the ongoing social fracture to technology leaders?

DATA OBSERVABILITY: True Scalable, Automated & Predictive Data Quality Tools for Reliable & Healthier Smart Data Pipelines

• Common data quality issues here in MENA region: duplicate data, inconsistent data, schema changes & data drift
• Prevention is often better than a cure: good data observability practices translate to solid data health – alerting your DataOps team in time & why does it matter?
• Being one step ahead of the game – why proactively checking for quality issues with your data pipeline can help reduce migration risks & costs, improve regulatory compliance & data downtime

How to Bring Profits & the Planet Together: Aligning Priorities with Data-Driven Sustainability

• Are we witnessing the 'Third Wave of Global Economic Transformation’? Is the sustainable business narrative translating to the next frontier for large enterprises?
• Getting insight on operational transparency to hash out strategies and make a bigger impact
• Achieving true sustainable transformation by integrating sustainability data across the value chain of business process

MC OPENS

FEATURED FIRESIDE CHAT: The Master Data Fabric Architecture & Approach – Value Engineering with AI Principles

• How to operate with disparate sets of data on a multi-cloud environment to drive advanced analytics & AI capabilities for better decision making? How to ensure that the right data is available at the right location and the right application at the right time?
• Industry research highlights that up to 2/3 (~68%) of enterprise data often left unleveraged and not analyzed – yet, data is the ultimate source for driving business innovation. How to utilize low / no-code modular analytics capabilities with application development to derive composable data analytics?
• How does the data fabric differ from data mesh? Would it be best to purchase the data fabric as a platform or is it preferable to have it built? How to enable flexible yet automated data access, integration & sharing?
• Data fabric outlines great technical benefits, efficiency & elegance – the key question remains, how to determine its true value for your organization?

Data Lakehouse Platforms: Unifying Data Warehousing & AI Capabilities on a Singular Platform

• How to avoid getting trapped with a vendor & limited eco-systems & expensive platform costs? Ensuring open-source is at the core of your solution
• Eliminating complexity & excessive costs – achieving full potential of your analytics & AI initiatives
• How to get the best of both worlds?
  • Data warehouse -> great reliability, fantastic performance & strong governance
  • Data lake -> fabulous flexibility, great openness & machine learning support
  • Data Lakehouse – All in one

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: Chief Data Officers (CDOs) Cross-Industry Spotlight Discussion

• What should my data & analytics strategy look like? Has data & analytics strategy evolved from being a discipline to a wider set of capabilities that translates to enterprise digital transformation & strategy?
• In especially challenging economic times, does the business management team turn to data as a trusted source for quality decision making? And are you able to deliver that data with the right context?
• Deriving value from data at your organization – what would you count as a recent win? Are we limiting the use of data to just fuel fact-based decision-making? How about expanding offerings for internal & external end-users with more data-focused products?
• What does the future hold? Outcomes or Predictions?
  • Will ELT evolve to become fully managed or will we still need to be worried about overloading data warehouses fearing slower query times or crashes?
  • Will the DataOps ecosystem mature? Will we start seeing DataOps built features directly within end-user apps & products with tools for data lineage tracking & version control?
  • Will data become more accessible within your enterprise with ‘Operational Analytics’ being used on a day-to-day basis by frontline staff?
  • What about collaborative analytics? When will business units & data teams within the same enterprise start using the right lingo for progress on how data is shared internally?
  • Will we see the continuous rise of automation? What about the use of coding frameworks that enable distributed data processing at scale?

DataOps & AIOps: Challenges & Strategies

• Can DataOps & AIOps be translated as a software engineering challenge? Why is the reliability of data products crucial for sustainable value creation?
• Getting the best fit from the intersection between methodology, business requirements & latest technology from the marketplace – how to get in-house automation scripts & reusable components to serve on the front-end while SaaS products & cloud services do the heavy lifting?
• Bringing speed and agility with end-to-end data processes – challenges in operations and maintenance of a data factory

Improving Impact with Modernized Data Stacks with Built-In Connectors – Why Waste Data Engineering Time & Talent?

• Switching from manual hand coding with ETL tools to automated ELT – centralize your data, replicate databases whether on-prem or cloud & enable instant access with low-impact queries – Is all this possible with no coding?
• Pre-built data models to make an impact right from get go, level-up analytics capabilities with accurate data transformations – what kind of accelerated timelines to insight can you expect?

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: BFSI (Banking, Financial Services & Insurance) Industry Panel

• Leaving behind disconnected data silos, large pools of replicated data, unsynchronized data sets & tradition data processing – is it possible to leverage data virtualization capabilities to implement a logical data warehouse which promotes a data sharing culture within your bank?
• How to go about accelerating digitalization in the MENA BFSI industry? What is your take on forming partnerships with platform players & ecosystem hosts to go mainstream?
• Open Banking & Open APIs – how to build trust, mitigate competition risk and offer customers real-time, dynamic, contextual & scalable services?
• Will enabling modern data mesh architecture help bring about more efficiency?
• What are some of the best practices when it comes to ‘Alternative Data’ in financial institutions? Will transaction analytics help to gain a competitive edge, leverage open banking & open up the unbanked market in the MENA region?

Deploying Data to Streamline the Critical User Journey

• The importance of ensuring customer satisfaction and eliminating roadblocks in the user journey – unlocking the potential of user-generated content (USG)
• Customers are interacting with companies across multiple platforms – how to capture the full UX picture?
• Personalizing the experience – going further than merely addressing the customer by name - how to elevate your marketing approach and drive the feedback loop to maintain engagement?

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: Data Governance, Data Ethics & Data Privacy – Is the MENA region Moving towards Maturity?

• Struggling with the basics & finding the right start points for governance focused activities – Do you often find that data & analytics governance dominates your time & energy? Moving from a compliance-driven mindset to value-driven mindset. What are some of the foundational pillars for a healthy governance program?
• Have self-service analytical tools embedded within apps empowered employees across your enterprise and demonstrated actionable insight? Have you considered implementing self-service governance to mitigate security risks?
• ‘Connected Governance’: Will an advanced governance platform help address complex challenges that arise due to enterprise structures spanning across international borders, group holding companies or inter-department data restrictions?
• Is the concept of analytics democratization at odds with governance? How to maintain the balance with seemingly conflicting approaches?
• How to turn ‘Privacy Automation’ into a competitive differentiator? Going beyond merely ticking the compliance boxes to building trust with your end-users
• Augmented Data Governance – Is it possible to develop a self-learning model using Metadata that identifies risks & detects benefits?
• How to go about adapting data governance to the culture and maturity of our organizations? What are some of our stories here in the Middle East?

Real ROI = Data Virtualization – Finding the Right Strategy for Data Adoption

• How to create a better ecosystem for your data to drive business value? Making sense of vast quantities of enterprise data – leveraging on data collaboration & inter-linking
• Anchoring analytics strategies and how to identify strategies for growth?
• What is the true value & power of trusted insight? Can you help deliver Insight as a Service to stakeholders within your organization? Building a data product which combines human intelligence with machine learning and driven by advanced analytics

Forecasting the Future with Predictive Modelling

• Utilizing data mining and probability practices to predict results – how to work around the vulnerabilities?
• How to take the guesswork out of business operations? Forecasting costs & demand with predictive analytics
• How can you stay ahead of the competition? Using Machine Learning in identifying trends & patterns

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: Retail, Digital E-Commerce & Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs) Industry Discussion

• Drawing up a holistic view of every potential customer for your brand: Is it possible to leverage 360-views of targeted customers to draw up a marketing campaign for a bigger impact? Modeling your marketing mix to make sense for the MENA based customer & how does applying advanced analytics improve customer lifecycle management?
• How to catalog vast sets of data volumes which is quite common in the retail industry in an efficient manner? Is there an emphasis on data collaboration to build the foundation of trusted enterprise data which is used to transform data assets to positive customer experiences?
• Prioritize & personalize customer engagement using MarTech stacks – how to learn from use cases in dynamic segmentation with a Data Cloud & marketing optimization with built-in ROI engines?
• How does informed decision-making help you with web-stores and ecommerce applications? Can transaction & loyalty data from targeted data mining be utilized to update pricing, promotions and sort local availability of products?
• How can the retail & CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industries leverage secure data sharing to coordinate decisions across supply chain, brand marketing, pricing & promotions? What are some of the current trends that are driving growth & efficiency?
• Has the pandemic helped push MENA consumers over the digital / online barrier? How does your brand bridge the in-store to web-store divide?

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSION: The Big Comeback – Tourism, Travel, Hospitality, Entertainment, Leisure & Loyalty

• How to prepare for travel industry’s digital-first, data-driven future? Is it possible to use advanced data analytics to spot recovery trends, patterns, prepare for future disruptions, run efficient and a more profitable business whilst delivering outstanding customer experiences?
• Managing turbulence – how did we leverage big data analytics in the MEA travel tourism industry to overcome recent industry roadblocks? Does contextual predictive analytics & insights really help when it comes to such one-off events?
• Measuring the growth in online activity & responding to new customer behavior – is it better to respond with big & blue sky initiatives or to innovate in a consistent manner?
• How can the Data Cloud enable your business to transform enterprise data to reusable & analytics-ready systems necessary for disruptive innovation and achieve competitive advantage during uncertain times?
• Understanding the importance of trusted & accurate data when it comes to managing schedules, forecasting demand & revenue growth in volatile times – is it a common challenge to find quality data points in the MEA region?
• How to improve industry acceptance of new technologies? Does increased revenue from unexplored avenues & channels justify the cost of running deep analytics and data mining? Has the advent of cloud infrastructure, flexible scaling & reduction of CAPEX burden on hardware infrastructure improved technology improvement outlays as risk appropriate?