Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 42 | Page 61

PROFILE providing direction, guidance and vision for the IT department. What are the main challenges of your role at AZIZI Developments? With the number of technologies increasingly approaching in the market, the challenges are not just limited to modernising the legacy systems or redefining how IT works, but tackling multi- cloud challenges, building the IT culture and dealing with legacy systems to successfully execute on Digital Transformation strategies. WE ARE GRADUALLY TURNING TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING TO TRANSFORM HOW WE INTERACT WITH OUR CUSTOMERS. What have been the main IT achievements of your organisation in the past year? Looking back at the IT strategy and roadmap set up for 2018, I am very pleased that we have over-accomplished the business goals and delivered various solutions to multiple business requirements. One of the main achievements was moving away from the on-premise legacy environment to a cloud and virtualised environment for better security, flexibility, scalability and availability with fully managed 24x7 support. In what ways do you use technology to enhance the experience of your customers? We are gradually turning to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to transform how we interact with our customers, strengthen their relationship, provide unique experiences, distinguish ourselves from competitors and increase revenue. What is the most important lesson you have learnt in your career? I don’t believe there is a most or least important lesson learned in anyone’s career. Lesson learned is a continuous life cycle as there will always be one or a few throughout your journey. The most important thing is to learn and improve as you progress. What technologies are you looking to invest in? Even though 2019 is a fascinating year for the real estate and construction industry, we plan to invest substantially on state- of-the-art technologies that will improve efficiency and productivity, reduce cost and increase profitability. The technologies we are looking at are those that will help us with Digital Transformation and automation. We are already working with our partner doing process mapping, which will take us through the Digital Transformation process. Robotic Process Automation is something we are looking at to automate as many processes as possible. depend on the people (their experience, values, motives) and the situation (stable/ changing, new/seasonal team, short/long term focus). The key to being an effective manager or leader is to have a broad repertoire of styles and to use them appropriately. How important do you think it is to adapt a consultative approach? There are so many different styles that people can choose from. They are part of your personality, but that does not mean your personality is suitable for who you face and situations that you’re in. How bad is the IT skills shortage? The consequences of not reviewing lessons learned, will have the likelihood of repeating actions that might cause project failures, budget overruns, scope creep, reduced quality from expectations and missed scheduled deadlines. www.intelligentcio.com How would you describe your managerial style? Although I use the authoritative style most of the time, I think there is no best managerial style. The most suitable one will Regardless of whether the IT services are hosted on premise or on the cloud, we don’t seem to have any IT skills shortages in running the day-to-day IT operations and supporting the business needs. Even if INTELLIGENTCIO 61