CIOs leave their impact on the 5th IT Leaders Africa Summit
The 5th IT Leaders Africa Summit kicked off last week on the 18th of March 2014. Over one hundred senior executives representing the region’s largest enterprises gathered for the official opening conducted by Minister Yunus Carrim, the Minister of Communications for South Africa. Minister Carrim discussed the rollout of the National Broadband Policy, SA Connect, designed to give broadband access to every SA citizen by 2030 and the significant role that technology will play in educating the next generation, a common theme that emerged during the 2 day summit.
The IT Leaders Africa Summit provided a platform for the region’s IT leaders to interact and event organisers, Kinetic brought together experts from leading organisations to address topical industry challenges. Darryl Thwaits the CIO of Tiger Brands delivered a keynote on Transparent IT Governance and stated that if today’s IT leaders ignore governance; they’re not qualified to run their ‘ship’.
Bringing insight from last month’s Mobile World Congress, Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx stated that FM Radio will be the future communication medium of choice in Africa in a panel discussion that featured award winning blogger, Liron Segev, CIO Consultant, Leonie Groenewald and ICT Manager of Redefine Properties, Vincent Labuschagne. Liron claimed that although phones and tablets are getting cheaper and more affordable devices are on the cards, quality is still important to the African market.
In between keynotes and panel discussions, 6 technology workshops presented by Wipro Technologies, SAP, BT and Airwatch addressed key issues including Moving to the Cloud, Design Thinking and Connecting Business to Africa and the World.
The innovation display area enabled attendees to connect with industry providers and peers andindicated that the real value at this event was in the networking. Innovation provider In4Group launched their latest product ‘DR in a box’ at the event, a solution designed to make disaster planning, recovery and backing up of valuable data easy. Other industry providers including Inobits, Kofax and Informatica demonstrated solutions that covered the central themes on the event agenda: Transparent IT Governance and The Future of Enterprise IT in Africa.
Visit http://itleaders.co.za/ or contact Marcia van Jaarsveld on+27 21 555 0866 or [email protected] Follow @ITLeadersAfrica and @KineticEventsSA on Twitter for daily updates. #ITLAfrica
