New Gitex Global Leaders Summit Hosts World's Foremost ICT Business Minds

Some of the world's most influential IT decisions makers and experts in communication technology are set to converge in Dubai for the first-ever Gitex Global Leaders Summit, one of the new highlights of the region's largest ICT event.

As Gitex celebrates its 30th anniversary at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre from October 17 to 21, 2010, many of the technology industry's most respected names will be available to give firsthand advice from an expert perspective.

Providing cutting edge insights into today's global ICT landscape, the Global Leaders Summit will host Rajeev Asija, Executive Vice President Enterprise Solution & Services Business, HCL Infosystems, a Gitex strategic sponsor; Ali Faramawy, Microsoft Corporation Vice President, Microsoft International and Area Vice President, Microsoft Middle East & Africa; Bhaskar Gorti, Senior Vice President and General Manager - Communications Global Business Unit, Oracle; and Randi Zuckerberg, Director of Market Development, Facebook.

The Gitex Global Leaders Summit celebrates the theme 'Inspiring Innovation and Collaboration' where speakers will cover topics that address emerging communications and technology trends, as well as the coordinated efforts needed from the region's stakeholders to bring about change. The Summit is an exclusive opportunity to network with the region's top decision makers and meet some of the world's foremost thinkers.

Rajeev Asija, Executive Vice President of HCL, India's $5bn global technology business begins the sessions on October 17. This HCL veteran of nearly 30 years heads Enterprise Solutions and Services Business and will be speaking on 'Transcending Boundaries'.

Ali Faramawy, Vice President of Microsoft International, is directly responsible for Microsoft's operations across the Middle East and Africa. He plays a leading role in the company's worldwide emerging markets community and will discuss the phenomenon of cloud computing in 'How to Thrive and Grow with the Cloud'.

Bhaskar Gorti, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Communications Global Business Unit for Oracle will share his expertise in telecom growth and developing markets. He is responsible for managing Oracle's strategic planning, product development, sales, service and support for Oracle's communication products. Gorti will be highlighting the issues on how to 'Thrive in the Age of Telecom Transformation'.

Returning to Gitex Technology Week for the second year in a row, Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Original Equipment Manufacturer Division will also present 'Innovation and How that Equals Opportunity for You' on October 18, at an exclusive, invitation-only keynote address.

Gitex is also hosting the Global Conferences programme featuring over 30 thought-provoking sessions led by ICT leaders.

Helal Saeed Almarri, CEO, Dubai World Trade Centre, organiser of Gitex Technology Week, said:

"Gitex has established itself as an ICT event that provides opportunities for regional companies to attract global business. As the largest technology show in Africa and the Middle East, it acts as a driver for investments and knowledge sharing. We are committed to keep Gitex fresh, cutting edge and relevant, and along with the show's other new features, the new Global Leaders Summit aligns perfectly with that. The attendance of world-class speakers illustrates the impact Gitex has made on the international ICT stage."

Running alongside the Global Leaders Summit, the Gitex Cloud Confex, with platinum sponsors HP, and Gitex Mobile Apps & Content World with Industry Partner MEF also make their debut to ensure the event reflects and drives the most relevant ICT issues of the day. The Gitex Global Conference will ensure the event is the most comprehensive knowledge platform in the region and will bring together business leaders, government departments and trade professionals to network, discuss critical industry issues and explore opportunities for growth.

The Global Conference includes 30 streams and more than 50 local and international industry expert speakers, giving advice on a full spectrum of information and communication technology issues. Small and medium businesses, GULFCOMMS, environmentally-friendly IT, the future of security and dozens more debates will ensure hundreds of delegates are kept up to date, informed and aware of the latest developments.

Contributors include Tareque Choudhury, Head of Business Continuity and Security at BT, Khaled Kefel, General Manager of RIM Middle East, and Edmund English, EMEA Senior Marketing Manager, Dell and Irfan Ali, Senior Operator Account Manager, Nokia.

The three days of streamed networking and knowledge sharing will be followed by a Developer Day on Thursday, October 21, where developers, programmers, engineers, analysts, technicians, network managers and many others will gain expert advice and top tips.

Gitex embodies the continuing momentum of growth in the Middle East ICT sector and draws global attention and mounting investment to the region. The show connects more than 133,000 industry professionals from 135 countries with over 3,500 suppliers and is one of the most influential and high-profile events in the global ICT sector today.

Gitex Technology Week runs from 17 - 21 October 2010, at Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre. Admission is for trade and industry professionals only. To register or for more information please visit www.gitex.com.

Nadeen El Ajou

United Arab Emirates: Sunday, October 10- 2010

http://www.ameinfo.com/244645.html

Australia to import more IT workers

While information and communication technology professionals say work is thin on the ground in some cities, industry figures point to a future where more foreign workers are shipped in to plug the gaps between what employers want and what's on offer locally.


Entity Solutions is one of the newest entrants to the market of importing ICT talent. The contractor management firm finalised an on-hire labour agreement late last month with the Department of Immigration, enabling it to bring up to 50 ICT workers a year into Australia, under the 457 visa program.


Businesses can use the program to sponsor workers from a range of occupations for up to four years, should they be unable to fill roles with qualified local staff. The process can be an expeditious one, with many overseas candidates able to report for duty within days of getting the nod.


Entity CEO Matthew Franceschini said a key part of negotiating the labour hire agreement had been demonstrating that the firm's clients had been unable to find appropriately skilled workers from within Australia.




"We have been able to demonstrate that to the government," Franceschini said.


Our clients have skilled positions they are unable to fill. There's a global shortage of talent – it's as simple as that."


But in the ever-volatile ICT sector, one man's shortage can be another's surfeit. Entity's announcement comes as local recruiters and employers point to a slowdown in the market for contract staff.


Many ICT professionals are critical of the 457 visa system, which they say makes it too easy for large companies to substitute local staff with cut-price equivalents from overseas, either directly or via third-party service providers.


"Those of us on reasonably good salaries are being replaced by Indian or other international workforces at salaries significantly less than enterprises would be paying their staff," one senior IT network executive working on contract told IT Pro.


"There's an underlying theme here, in that the number of IT jobs in westernised countries are probably not reducing by as much as being reported, but merely being usurped by backdoor means through offshoring."


Employers would rather hire locally but it was not always possible, Franceschini claimed, and many clients around the country were keen to find a quick solution which fulfilled their needs.


Entity plans to use its 457 quota to sponsor developers, programmers and software engineers into Australia.


They'll join the 90,280 skilled workers, 8800 of them in the information, media and telecoms industry, who held primary 457 visas as of 31 May, according to Department of Immigration figures.


The sector accounted for 10 per cent of the 47,980 applications received from July 2011 to May 31, with ICT positions attracting an average annual remuneration package of $85,100.


Candidates most commonly hailed from the UK, India and Ireland, with workers from these countries collectively accounting for half of all 457 applications granted.


Successful ICT applicants included 1870 developer programmers, 1110 ICT business analysts and 1080 software programmers.


While recruiters continue to cite skill shortages outside the southern capitals, particularly in the resource driven WA market, 7760 of the 8800 ICT hires on 457 visas were drafted for positions based in NSW and Victoria.


Head of listed recruitment group Clarius Kym Quick said the number of high tech 457 applications would rise significantly in the future, if Australian students continued to eschew computer science and information technology courses.


ICT enrolments in local universities have halved over the past decade while in NSW high schools, just seven per cent of students are studying Information Processes and Technology, down from 17.9 per cent in 2003.


Economically-moribund Ireland, where the unemployment rate has soared since the global financial crisis, had become an especially popular source of willing-to-relocate, high tech workers, Quick said.


Some larger employers were forging their own links with overseas agents to improve their access to this talent pool, she added.


The chief executive officer of the Australian Information Industry Association, Suzanne Campbell, said systemic issues in the education system meant there was an ongoing and significant gap between the supply and demand of ICT skills in Australia.


"Industry uses 457 visas to supplement that deficiency," Campbell said.


Holders of the 457 visa span the entire ICT industry, from project delivery staff, software specialists and systems integrators through to senior executives managing major projects and programs, Campbell said.

July 6, 2012.  By Sylvia Pennington

Retrieved from: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/australia-to-import-more-it-workers-20120706-21kh2.html#ixzz203A6kM4M 

New ICT centre opens

National ICT Australia (NICTA), the country's new Information and Communications Technology Centre, has opened for business and is seeking applications for senior management positions and 30 post-doctoral fellowships.

"This is the first step in building a word-class ICT research centre," the CEO of NICTA, Brian Anderson said today.

"We are seeking to fill senior management positions in the areas of commercialisation, industry development and IT management. The post-doctoral fellow positions will grow the initial research program, and we will shortly embark on a targeted search for world-class researchers, with advertisements in the national and international press."

Professor Anderson said NICTA had been 'kick-started' by secondment of some of the best researchers from its partner universities, ANU and UNSW.

"This has allowed us to hit the ground running and create an international presence almost immediately," Professor Anderson said.

NICTA was chosen to operate Australia's first ICT Centre of Excellence in May this year. The Centre will receive nearly $125 million in federal funding over the first five years through the Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts and the Australian Research Council. The Centre will be based primarily in Sydney and Canberra.

"The objective is to build a research institute comparable to the best international ICT research centres," Professor Anderson said. "It draws its inspiration from the best practices of both the world's major commercial R&D labs and the great ICT universities. Its four-fold mission of research, research training, commercialisation and linkages places it in a unique position to undertake medium to long-term research in a commercially relevant setting."

NICTA is also offering scholarships to attract high quality students to its prestigious new PhD program. The students will benefit from advanced coursework, training in business development and intellectual property management and extended visits to major international centers in NICTA's research training network.

NICTA is already in discussion with a number of Australian private and public sector research organisations and universities for collaboration. The Centre will operate as an open institution with an independent board, which will be supported by an International Scientific Advisory Committee and an International Business Advisory Committee.

Neville Roach, chairman of NICTA, said: "On behalf of the NICTA Board I would like to say how delighted I am that we have achieved this significant milestone. The conclusion of the complex establishment process in a very short time was entirely due to the goodwill and commitment of all parties involved, including the Commonwealth and NICTA's core partners, the Board and management, all of whom gave 'benefit to Australia' the highest priority.

"Our core partners - the NSW and ACT Governments, UNSW and ANU - deserve special congratulations and appreciation for forming and resourcing the successful bid consortium and for underwriting the operations of NICTA to this point. The Board and management are very conscious of the trust that has been placed in us and are fully committed to build NICTA into a world class institution," Mr Roach said.

October 16, 2002.  Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/16/1034561207329.html

ICT's spread creates opportunities

In market economies, companies develop business models and use business processes to create wealth. A business model is essentially a strategic plan developed to identify and capture market opportunities. Business processes are developed to acquire, organise, and co-ordinate the production needed to take goods and services to market.

Over the past 25 years there has been dramatic development and change in the information and communication technologies (ICT) that companies use to organise and manage their models and processes.

Today, ICT pervades business and also the everyday lives of ordinary people. Most homes have PCs. More and more of these are connected to the internet, and a growing number of these connections are broadband. This pervasiveness challenges traditional models and processes.

These challenges are likely to lead to several possible outcomes for firms, depending on how they adapt. A company might refuse to acknowledge them altogether, fail to sustain its business model and go out of business.

On the other hand, a company might see the opportunities these challenges present and take advantage of them, modifying its business model and expand its market share.

The pervasiveness of ICT presents new market 

opportunities and the chance to create new business models. Companies trading in the market for information, such as stockbrokers and travel agents, for example, warrant particular attention.

Traditional travel agency businesses haven't just sold airline tickets. Typically, these ticket sales are the conclusion of a transaction that has involved sifting through information to answer questions about costs, schedules and visa requirements.

Agencies have existed because they provide a means for buyers to reduce the information "asymmetry" between themselves and the seller of a good or service.

This asymmetry is where bargaining power is determined, through one party possessing more information than the other party.

In the past, without an agent or broker, finding the cheapest ticket or the most direct flight was difficult. It could be done, but the cost in time and effort were too great. So travellers generally used the service of an agent who had invested in systems to search for the best deal for their customers.

That service would reduce the asymmetry. Ticket buyers would complete transactions, confident they had the same information about the transaction as the seller, and so pay what they considered a fair price.

Capital markets recognise when this information asymmetry equalises. For example, one of the best-run and most successful travel agents in Australia, Flight Centre, has seen its share price relative to the market slowly subside in recent years.

It's no coincidence that this trend in its share price commenced around mid-2002 - about the time that ICT was becoming more and more accessible.

ICT allows buyers in the market to directly reduce information asymmetry.

The pervasiveness of ICT is also threatening businesses that developed business models around monopolies.

Telstra has had a telephony monopoly by virtue of it owning the hardware that enables the market for communication - its poles and wires.

Now that monopoly (and so its business plan) is threatened by wireless telephony systems.

Telstra recognises this and is attempting to change its model to ensure it captures new markets and long-term growth. Certainly it now sees itself as a serious provider of content. Sensis, along with the acquisition of publications such as the Trading Post stable, is part of this Telstra strategy.

For innovators tuned into the benefits, however, there are many opportunities to develop new models that take advantage of the reach of ICT.

Two recent ventures that have obviously identified great ICT-driven business opportunities arewotif.com and Isubscribe.

These businesses understand the problem that information asymmetry creates for buyers in markets for consumer goods and services.

They are dotcoms with real product.

Wotif.com's business model is quite simple - it acts as an intermediary that can broker excess room capacity for the hotel industry on a just-in-time basis and do it in virtual space - the web.

Nowadays potential hotel guests are a few mouse clicks away from an inventory of competitively priced rooms just a few days out from when they need them. And hotels can now wait until almost the last minute to off-load vacancies into an otherwise unavailable and, for them, a cheaply accessedmarket.

It's a good business model and wotif.com now has serious competitors.

Isubscribe is a completely different business from wotif.com but the business model is essentially the same.

It acts as a virtual intermediary in the market for magazine and newspaper subscriptions. Through the web, it reduces the search costs of the potential subscriber by offering direct subscription to more than 1000 publications and at the same time provides the publishers with a simple mechanism to market their publications.

The pervasiveness of ICT now provides challenges and opportunities to businesses: challenges to companies with business models that are threatened by this pervasiveness; and opportunities to those firms that identify potential new markets that this pervasiveness creates.

October 12, 2004.  By Colin Ferguson

Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/11/1097406488282.html?from=storylhs

Creating more productive teams through ICT

Whether at work or at play technology allows us to flourish in a connected, content-rich environment.

In work mode, we can download information, process it and write reports and even indulge in real-time conversations through instant messaging.

Information and communication technology can help boost improved customer service, faster response times and customisation of products. In short, ICT overcomes the constraints of both time and space. But beware the ICT productivity paradox.

A presumed strength of personal computers is that computer-enabled multitasking increases the efficiency of office workers. But human beings are not computers and cannot multitask in the same way.

The head of PEP Productivity Solutions, Bary Sherman has been quoted saying: “I used to say that multitasking made a task take 15 percent longer. Now I say 50 percent.”

This is because human multitasking involves one task being interrupted by another. And it’s not the time taken by the interruption itself that causes productivity to plummet but the recovery time – that is, the time it takes to get back to where you were before in terms of being focused on the task in hand. This recovery time can be a startling 10 to 20 times the length of the initial interruption.

True productivity arises from the interaction of people and machines, not just the availability of machines; computers do not exist in isolation from other systems. The ways in which ICT can boost productivity is a massive topic, but here we will look at just three areas: video conferencing, the much talked about ‘cloud’ and customer relationship management.

Despite its popularity email is a lousy communication tool when it comes to conversing, taking up to ten times longer than by telephone. So picking up the phone is one simple way to boost productivity. But even better is to use video conferencing.

Ricoh chief information officer Rob Livingstone works in conjunction with Telstra and Polycom to introduce an end-to-end high-definition video conferencing solution that it expects to increase both employee and enterprise productivity.

“As a service-based company, responsiveness is our lifeblood, enabling us to remain competitive,” Livingstone says in a statement. “High definition video conferencing is already reinventing the way our staff can communicate with each other and with our customers. There is greater workplace efficiency and less environmental impact thanks to a reduced need for employee travel time,” he says.

The technologies that give the biggest boost to productivity are those that are collaborative in nature, such as groupware and email. And these collaborative technologies help facilitate one of the most effective business process improvements – breaking down the walls between vertical business areas, the dreaded ‘silos’ and ‘stovepipes’. This is where the structure of the organisation largely or entirely restricts information flow.

In the past productivity software was stored on employees’ PCs and, if a document was to be worked on by others it was shuttled across the organisation by email and revisions and changes tracked. But now, with the advent of ‘cloud computing’ (whereby software programs and data are stored on the internet, not on a company’s servers), the democratic structure of the internet, and the fact that it is both virtual and real time, can be harnessed.

In a cloud environment employees can work on the same document at the same time, the progress that other teams members are making can be seen, and duplication avoided.

The key to great customer service is to give customers what they want, when they want it and at a price they perceive as being fair. And if you can give them something they didn’t even know they wanted, faster than they expected and offering even better value, you’ll be streets ahead of the competition.

CRM covers sales, marketing, customer service and technical support and, at its best, is a company-wide process in which every department is sales-oriented. Failure to do this can further entrench a silo mentality rather than breaking it down so a collaborative CRM should be implemented that builds bridges between departments.

Good though CRM is there has been an unacceptably high rate of companies investing heavily in systems that are not used to their full extent. Care must be taken that a system is easy to use, that it offers benefits not just to the company but the employees using it, and that sufficient training is given.

Dean Parham, until recently an assistant commissioner at the Productivity Commission, has been quoted in the Australian Financial Review saying “It’s not just having the ICT that’s important, it’s how you use [technologies] to create new products or reorganise your business.

It’s doing new things or doing things in new ways.”

•    Computers can multitask, people can’t. Human multitasking can make a job take 50 percent longer
•    Cloud computing harnesses the democratic nature of the internet to break down business silos
•    Customer relationship management can harness the power of the entire organisation to deliver excellent customer service

June 2, 2010.  By Roger Balch

Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/business/clevel/creating-more-productive-teams-through-ict-20100602-wyq8.html#ixzz2032kexkE