OREANDA-NEWS. November 9, 2010. The Seventh Annual IT Leader Forum was held in Moscow. The Forum brought together over 300 business executives, CIOs, and IT Directors from major Russian businesses, as well as recognized international experts, the mass media, and industry analysts.

This year, the share of business executives—CEOs, CFOs, and Directors of Strategy, Marketing, Sales, Logistics, and Security—increased, highlighting the growing importance of IT management issues. Attendees reported that they found the key theme of the forum—‘Competitive Breakthrough in the Post-Crisis Period: Ideas for Leaders’—to be particularly relevant. Forum topics—such as business process acceleration; mitigation of risks related to elaboration and delivery of development strategy; increasing customer and partner loyalty; improving production and logistics efficiency; effective innovative project management; and maximizing return on IT investment via formal classification of services—were all found to be highly relevant by company representatives.

The Plenary Session included presentations by Peter Hinssen (Managing Partner, Across Technology), Howard Polinski (Partner, Head of Performance and Technology Department, KPMG in Russia and CIS), Viktor Orlovsky (Senior Vice President, Member of the Board, Sberbank), Ed Toben (IT Advisor, Colgate-Palmolive), Boris Bobrovnikov (Director General, CROC), and Sergey Karpov (Director General, EMC Russia and CIS).

“It’s an amazing time we live in. We are witnessing an economic paradigm shift, and it is clear that innovations will become the major source of business development in the future. Innovations make business more flexible, cost effective, and efficient. I am glad that my Russian peers who spoke at the IT Leader Forum—a major event for IT professionals—share this view and actively discuss specific technologies to make a competitive breakthrough,” said Peter Hinssen, Managing Partner, Across Technology.

Ed Toben, IT Advisor, Colgate-Palmolive, remarked: “Keeping to the beaten track is always easier than making a new path, though there is the risk of ending up in a wrong place and in a wrong time. Being a leader in the use of advanced technology can be risky and costly for the business, but it provides the opportunity for a competitive breakthrough. There are many examples of it. For instance, complete reorganization of Colgate’s IT environment was one of the drivers in strengthening our position in the global markets.”

“It is clear that the CIO has dealt with significant changes in recent times. I presented KPMG’s recent survey which shows that many global IT Directors are optimistic about business development prospects and are transforming their IT management system to make it more adaptive. I am glad that the IT Leader creates a forum to discuss what will be on the CIO’s agenda in coming years, what the main obstacles are and where the opportunities will be revealed,” remarked Howard Polinski, Partner, Head of Performance and Technology, KPMG in Russia and CIS.

During the ‘Business Processes Acceleration’ workshop, Mesut Orta, Judge, Vice President, IT Department of Ministry of Justice, Turkey, shared how IT helped them transform all judicial communications to an electronic environment. “We discontinued the circulation of hardcopy documents among judicial units. At present, more than 40,000 employees—or 98% of total staff use—electronic signatures in their daily operations. All registry books and files were removed from courtrooms. All hearings are done in an electronic environment. Lawyers and citizens can now resolve legal issues via the Internet instead of physical attendance. Judges and lawyers can access all legal documents from the UYAP database. Citizens and lawyers can subscribe to SMS notifications to be aware of any changes in their files. All judicial operations, proceedings, and hearings are ‘transmitted’ to the electronic environment. Thanks to these changes, we now have an environmentally friendly judicial system, economize on paper and save time for people involved in the judicial process.”

During the ‘Risk Mitigation and Business Security’ workshop Jules Jerome, Deputy Director, Head of Inspection, Dexia Luxembourg, shared his experience in building efficient and reliable IT security system. “Dexia Group employs 35,234 employees. The bank is operating in two major fields: public financing and retail banking. The economic crisis had challenging consequences: some people lost their jobs and a significant part of their assets. As a result, the fraud risk increased strongly. To prevent frauds, we decided to follow a comprehensive strategy based on an audit trail tool on the business operations and user behavior level. The chosen tool is really remarkable: compliant with data privacy laws, it detects online abnormal and significant events and facts; it is essential to set up and feed a dissuasion climate. To improve IT security, first we implemented an automated provisioning tool: two-thirds of the access requests are now processed automatically. Then, to allow to the Business Lines to pilot the security of their IT assets, we decided to set up a new Identity and Access Model based on our own Role-Based Access Control model. In order to avoid disturbing the Business, we have built with our supplier a tool which facilitates much the roles mining and building. Now we are conducting our functional migration.”

After each workshop, moderators held a prize drawing for a racing radio-controlled car, as a symbol of the breakthrough in the post-crisis period, as well as an annual subscription to Forbes Magazine.

The organizers of the IT Leader Forum are the Russian Managers Association; CROC incorporated; and Itogi, CIO, and Intelligent Enterprise magazines.