Recommended: System Errors? Click here to Fix your PC »
Jamie McLellan, CIO for Europe, Africa and Middle East at Ogilvy, opened theSymposium with a presentation Deploying Technology for a Global Company: Innovationand Change Management, outlining Ogilvy s success in managing 497 offices in 125countries supporting more than 2,300 clients, and over 14,000 employees worldwide.According to McLellan, the global challenge is managing needs & wants as well asexpectations concerning IT, which in turn brings the issue of affordability andcompatibility. According to McLellan, demand generation, consumerism and evolutionare the key drivers for innovation.
Alexei Miller, Executive Vice President at DataArt, the host organization, describedthe evolution of software outsourcing industry through the prism of DataArt s 10year history. The path from generic software work in the late-90s, fuelled byinternet technologies boom and sobered by the following crash, the industry as awhole has taken a more mature, quality-driven position. DataArt continues toinnovate, building itself as a high-end provider of expertise-based outsourcing services. Miller covered two major trends which will affect the industry in the nextdecade: (1) the changing vendor landscape the shift from all-India strategy toglobal multi-sourcing, involving emerging geographies such as Eastern Europe and (2)the shift in the risk/responsibility equation; whereby vendors take on moreresponsibility and move from staff augmentation to application outsourcing servicemodel. DataArt sees itself as an enabler a vendor that helps companies use thesetrends to use global resources for tasks that were previously thought not suitablefor outsourcing.
Dr. Christian Oversohl, Vice President and Head of Sapient Europe, spoke aboutmanaging distributed teams and projects. After listing numerous challenges to anoutsourced project, from lack of executive support, clear business objectives,process and methodology to user and client management and cultural differences,Oversohl pointed that the basis for selecting the right offshore partner is the needto focus on the real cost of ownership for offshore projects, not simply cuttingcost as usually thought. Sapient s Global Distributed Delivery Model ensures smoothbridging of continents and cultures in delivering projects, where a united team andcommon methodology are the basis for success, and cultural differences are takeninto consideration.
Jean-Francois Loche, Vice President and CIO of Nissan Europe, made an overview ofhis organization's broad use of technology outsourcing over the years. Hehighlighted the differences in outsourcing approaches by major Nissan divisions -the U.S., Asia and Europe and described how outsourcing blends in with Nissan corebusiness planning process. Loche described Nissan IT group's BEST value up strategy,including key components Business Alignment, Enterprise Architecture, SelectiveSourcing and Technology Simplification.
Dr. Gernot Gmelin, Head of Global New Technologies, Technology Architecture andStrategy at Novartis Pharma AG, presented his company s outlook on changingtechnology environment and emerging information security threats. His presentationincluded examples of how a large organization such as Novartis educates itsemployees and partners on various aspects of information security.
Key not speaker, Mark Minevich, Founder and Executive Chairman of Billion MindsFoundation discussed globalization. In his presentation, he outlined the mission ofBMF to promote the sustainable development and growth of a global economy of sixbillion minds through social knowledge entrepreneurship and socially responsibleinvestments, and pointed that technology is an important enabler of this mission.
The event also included two panels, The Impact of Technology on Globalization ofFinancial Services, moderated by Orest Kyzyk of OMK Associates, and Russia s Role inGlobal Innovation, moderated by Heidi Brown, Senior Reporter at Forbes Magazine.
This is the first even of such magnitude hosted by DataArt, and represents thecompany s vision for using global resources in high end technology tasks.Participation of prominent technology executives from around the world reaffirmedthat vision. The company plans to organize the Symposium annually in one of its fourlocations worldwide
