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I believe people should be allowed to fail , and that a good team puts systems and processes in place that assumes failure will happen , which ensures the impact of failure is small .
What do you currently identify as the major areas of investment in your industry ?
Investment into CRM – consolidating customer data , understanding that data and using that data more effectively to drive brand loyalty and ultimately sales .
What are the region-specific challenges when implementing new technologies in the Middle East and Africa ? my focus naturally was on generating revenue and giving my first customers exactly what they wanted . However , truly scalable technology comes from fulfilling a sub-set of customer needs in the same way for every customer , rather than fulfilling all the needs for just a few customers . I ’ ve spent several years leveraging this hindsight , to spot trends amongst customers and focusing our products on these areas , to capitalise and scale the investments we make .
The brands in the Middle East and Africa often function independently of their parent brands ( or as licensees / official distributors ). This means that their technology strategy can be completely different , or at a very different stage , to the same brand in other markets – managing customer perception and expectations needs special attention .
Customers in the Middle East for example can often expect to operate in multiple languages and currencies even within the same country . This is pretty unusual outside the Middle East – while there are some bilingual countries like Canada and Belgium , customer expectations of payment in multiple currencies and different languages within the same countries is much more prominent in the Middle East .
What changes to your job role have you seen in the last year and how do you see these developing in the next 12 months ?
Increased focus on data security means that security process and reviews are becoming more and more a part of everything we do . There is also an increasing skills gap in software engineering that means an increased focus on recruitment and ways that the business can mitigate the need for software engineering skills – either by standardising processes and systems so that other team members can perform these tasks , or an increased focus on training and internal ‘ academies ’ to bridge these gaps .
What advice would you offer somebody aspiring to obtain C-level position in your industry ?
Understand the wider business contexts . Technology does not exist in a vacuum and if you can innately understand the commercial and business considerations that surround a technology solution , it will enable you to anticipate future problems and focus your team ’ s efforts only on the things that matter . p
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