First edition of the Casablanca IT Directors' Meeting

With the title "Decision Support in Digital Innovation: Trends and New Challenges", BABEL inaugurated its first edition of the Casablanca IT Directors' Meeting, which brought together a panel of IT decision-makers from major and innovative companies in Morocco.
 
On Thursday, January 23rd, we converted the magnificent Royal Suite of the Kenzi Hotel (Twin Center) into a convivial space where participants were able to enjoy breakfast while taking advantage of the breathtaking view of the arteries of Morocco's economic capital, before discussing our theme.
 
As we have noticed with our clients around the world, the data available to companies represents an enormous potential in understanding their business and in making managerial decisions, but requires a long term work in terms of relevance, analysis and modeling.

After an introduction of  BABEL on an international level and its ambitions to become one of the major players in IT Consulting in Morocco by Tony Olivo (Director of Operations at BABEL), Luis Barreiro (Head of the Big Data & Analytics service line at BABEL) illustrated the issues and sparked discussion among our guests with the support of Amine Khayatei (Business Partner at BABEL Maroc), Ana Castro (Director of BABEL Portugal and Morocco) and Camille Blanc (Head of the BABEL Casablanca office).
 
To fuel the debate, Ahmed Aifoute, IT Manager of online banking (Attijariwafa Bank); Nabil Amar, Associate Managing Director (Cash Plus); Hicham Badreddine, Director of Digital Transformation (Saham Assurances); Mehdi Bennani, Head of Digital Factory (Wafa Assurances); David Charretier, Director of Digital Transformation (Crédit du Maroc); François Jurd de Girancourt, Head of Banking and Insurance (McKinsey); Adil Ousti, Head of the Digital Factory (OCP), Sanaa Tazi, VP Digital Transformation and Business Intelligence (Royal Air Maroc) and Youssef Zerrari Director of Digital Factory (Société Générale) for share their feedback and vision with us.
 
We talked about exciting innovation topics such as Big Data, Machine Learning, Prescriptive Analytics but also addressed the day-to-day reality of companies.
 

First of all, it emerged that not all companies have the same level of maturity in this long process that can be described as "Data Journey". But what is important in this process is not to remain a spectator and therefore to undertake it: because the road to the new paradigm of the Data Centric enterprise is far from being a highway, especially for companies with legacy systems, but rather a path full of pitfalls. However, no major player can afford the luxury of doing without it, otherwise it will quickly be disrupted by new entrants that are fully "Data Centric".
 
Furthermore, companies face a difficulty in finding the right technical profiles and when they do, they must also ensure that the business lines evolve and are involved in defining the uses cases and what they want to measure and why.
 
In conclusion, it is indeed at the management level that the impetus must be initiated in order to make all the strengths of the company converge, to give the means and to make the mode of governance data oriented.
 
This first edition was a real success and we will soon renew the experience with a new and equally exciting topic. Thanks to Stéphanie Cuartas Betancourt (BABEL Morocco People and Communication Manager) for the organization of the event.