I have got an opportunity to be part of MEOUG MAJLIS 2017 Annual Oracle End Users conference and worked with the MEOUG Board to draft Agenda for the 2 days, what should be the theme, what should be the focus areas, what are the technology hot areas, we need to bring on the table.

MEOUG is the largest Oracle Users group in the Middle East, it is being run by very vibrant, energetic people who are the souls of this community to bring knowledge of Oracle technology to wider community of users. its a platform to learn and share from each other.  I am really thrilled and thankful to be part of this journey.

This year conference was the largest conference since the start of User group back in 2008, great work of community and regional CIOs, Volunteers, Partners and Oracle Executives, who have joined 2 days of conference. This was the 9th Annual Conference of MEOUG held at Hotel Atlantis, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai on March 22 & 23, 2017.Overall statistics of the conference: 700 + registrations, 400+ attended, 2 days, 45 sessions of Strategy, Roadmap & Hackathons.

I have also got responsibility of moderating number of sessions with regional CIOs, IT Managers, Project Managers and also presented session on PaaS for SaaS, How to build extensions for HCM & ERP Cloud.  

Summary of my learning, ideas, new points to focus or how overall IT industry is going on and what are the key focus areas of CIOs.

• Key note of Cliff Godwin, Senior Vice President, Applications Development on Oracle EBS, re-iterating the development efforts on new releases, functionality and how it can be migrated to Oracle Public Cloud. Number of Learning pointers for folks to consider during overall IT strategy of the organization
• Unlock the Puzzle of Innovation, a great and unique keynote from Farid Farouq, CIO of Dubai World Trade Centre, excellent presentation, covers all the characteristics of “Story Telling” Must attend session, whoever did not, missed it big time 🙂
• Talk on transforming roles of CIOs to CDOs(Chief Digital Officers) or CTOs(Chief Transformation Officer) during opening keynote of MEOUG by Arun Khehar, Senior Vice President, Oracle
• So many sessions on IOT & Machine learning, Implementing VAT in the GCC, Co-existance of applications, Digital Field service, Cloud Test Drive – live access and practice of Oracle PaaS solutions. Oracle Cloud @Customer,
• Plenty of knowledge, learning and sharing.

CIOs focus Areas:

While reviewing the MEOUG MAJLIS agenda of MEOUG 2014, MAJLIS 2015, 2016 vs MEOUG MAJLIS 2017, we can clearly make out that what are the priorities and i was surprised to see this quick look of agendas. for example organizations were talking about:

• Upgrade of business applications to new version like e-Business suite
• Upgrade vs re-implementation
• Self-service applications/business functions
• best practices to build Extensions
• Avoiding roadblocks in implementations
• Role of Enterprise architecture in organizations
• Journey to Cloud

Year 2017

• Solving the Puzzle of Innovation
• CIOs to CDOs or CTOs, this all to coup with Digital disruption and lead the organization for digital transformation
• How IOT can help in transforming the business like Video surveillance, How to use machine learning – IOT to bring analytic at the center of company
• Digital field service – start living in the customer experience and what actually customer experience mean …
• How Talent is being managed in the organizations
• Transformation in Retail
• Role of GRC in business
• Le averaging cloud solutions for quick and speedy solution for business problems
• Business applications co-existence and deciding what data we can put into the cloud

One of the top advise if you want from me that is, being working on Oracle Technologies you must join/attend these user group facilitated sessions/events as these are the gems of knowledge and experience to you. there is no other such platform exist. Go now to google and find out user groups in your region and just join them.

Finally every year what we get as token of thanks 🙂