Hilmi Rifai

Gartner is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company.

Trusted advisor to CIOs of major organizations, ministries and government entities helping them identify, plan and execute key initiatives that are critical to achieve IT alignment with Business strategy and maximize the business value of IT. Industry coverage includes: government, telecom, retail and education. Covered countries: UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Key areas:
• IT Strategic planning
• IT Governance
• Business value of IT
• Business continuity management
• Application architecture
• Digital business
• IT budgeting
• IT cost optimization
• IT organizational design
• Innovation management
• Outsourcing
• Risk management
• Shared services
• Vendor management
• Information security

More information can be provided upon request.

Multi-Billion conglomerate of companies with leading positions in investment, property development, manufacturing and contracting. Companies portfolio includes: Emirates International Investment Company, Bloom Properties, Exeed Industries, Rise and Petromal.

Lead IT strategy and implementation of corporate level solutions focusing on business operations transformation, automation and optimization with continuous focus on quality, efficiency and cost control. Re-engineered IT organization from costly and low performance decentralized model to aligned, motivated and efficient centralized organization providing IT services to all the group businesses in UAE and abroad.

Key Achievements:
• Transformed IT management approach from ad-hoc, isolated projects to scientific, planned and aligned group IT strategy initiative through building trust relationships and resolving conflicts with the holding Executive Committee and Business Units CEOs and providing high quality consulting services, strategy, budgeting, and execution plans.

• Re-engineered the IT Organization from decentralized, unorganized model to highly efficient centralized shared services model based on international best practices and standards in IT governance, risk management, project management, operations and security, thus being able to achieve ISO 27001 certification in Information Security in record time.

• Boosted the business operations by implementing SAP ERP in areas of HR, Finance, Production Planning, Sales & Distribution, Materials Management in several Business Units and factories.

• Revamped the IT infrastructure into a secure, high available and cost effective setup, leading to significant IT cost reduction in infrastructure and operation.

• Reduced time and cost of business operations in several areas by automating and optimizing business processes.

• Actively contributed to the establishment of an objective driven performance management system for the human capital as member of the holding performance management committee.

Lead IT Operations strategy and implementation of the IT services for all the holding Business Units in UAE and abroad. Established a core team of 55 professionals which effectively supported the holding businesses during a highly demanding phase of expansion. Revamped the IT shared services model into an agile organization based on best practices standards and processes.

Key Achievements:
• Achieved the title of “IT Department of the year 2008” at ACN Arab Technology Awards.

• Transformed the IT Operations & Professional Services into an ISO 27001 certified organization in Information Security.

• Created and coached the Professional Services team that highly contributed to boosting the business operations through the implementation of Oracle ERP in areas of HR, Finance, Property Management, CRM, as well as many other corporate solutions.

• Achieved a state of the art infrastructure including data centers, network, servers, storage and databases supporting mission critical systems requiring high levels of agility, availability and performance.

• Established an effective central Service Desk based on ITIL best practices and supporting 3500 users across the group.

• Assigned by the top management to merge the IT organization of Tatweer (one of largest companies of the group) with the central Group IT. Managed all aspects of the merger: strategy, budget, staff re-allocation and job offers negotiations, infrastructure, applications, processes, licenses and contractual commitments. Achieved smooth merger in record time with continuous focus on SLAs and cost reduction.

Member of the senior management team participating actively in the formulation of the business strategy. In charge of multi-million projects delivery to corporate clients, with continuous focus on quality and cost, as well as business development thus assuring high level of customer retention and repeated sales.

Key Achievements:
• Established delivery teams in many areas of IT services and mission critical systems including: Help Desk, Network & Systems monitoring, Enterprise Antivirus solutions, Job scheduling systems, Security systems, and Desktop management systems.

• Actively developed awareness of clients of CA offering as well as identifying areas to enhance clients operations using CA portfolio of products.

• Envisioned and implemented an efficient Program/Project Management system based on PMI standards.

• Established prestigious client portfolio including Dubai Police, Dubai Holding, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), Middle East Airlines, American Insurance Group (AIG), Al Tayer Group.

Company created by Dubai Civil Aviation (DCA) to provide B2B e-Business services for the multi-billion expansion of Dubai International Airport.

Started up the company from scratch: business and marketing plans endorsed by Dubai Airport senior executives, office set up, staffing, design and implementation of infrastructure and e-Business services, business development in Gulf and Europe.

Key Achievements:
• Launched more than 11 efficient B2B services to streamline bidding process including: pre-qualification, online cataloging, Request for Proposals, Auctions, Vendor scoring, Services used by Dubai Airport staff, consultants, and vendors.

• Achieved a base of 380 prestigious suppliers from different regions of the world

• Lead the company to a profitable point in the span of 6 months.

Consulting and managing multi-million dollar projects for major Telecom Operators in the Middle East. Consulting covered strategy (IT, CRM), systems designs and implementation (e-Business, billing, CRM), management consulting on IT processes and procedures, management of post implementation support, and account management.

Key Achievements:
• Saudi Telecom Company (STC): Managed implementation of Corporate Internet portal (Broadvision), Corporate Intranet portal (Broadvision), Document management system (Filenet), Search solution (Verity), eProcurement system (Oracle + Rightfax), and technical infrastructure availability.

• Mobile Telecom Company (MTC, Zain): formulated e-CRM Strategy over 5 years, and managed design, development and implementation of a comprehensive e-CRM (electronic Customer
Relationship Management) solution through a dedicated Internet portal fully integrated with the company’s billing system.

• MobileCom (Jordan Telecom): Managed implementation of the BSCS (Business Support and Control System) Billing system, in addition to Provisioning, call collection, interface with the financial system and payment collection entities, invoicing & print-shop system, web-based CRM and activation at all Point of Sales.

• Contributed actively in business development, identifying clients needs and proposals development.

Member of a European project to study the effect of Mobile Phones radiations on the human head. Managed the technical design and implementation of e-collaboration tools and complex simulation algorithms of the absorption of electromagnetic fields generated by cellular phones into the different types of tissues in the human head. Modeling of the head is based on automatic segmentation of medical images (MRI and CR Scans).

Key Achievements:
• Managed all technical aspects of the project related to scope, implementation, acceptance, budget and quality.

• Managed Relationship among stakeholders: technical, medical and research teams involved in the project.

• Designed and implemented several new signal and image processing algorithms to segment the human head tissues in MRI and CT scans medical images.

• Published image processing algorithms in several international journals and conference proceeding, leading to achieve Ph.D. Degree in this field.