The Information Systems Department of the College of Economics & Political Science at Sultan Qaboos University held The “2nd Information Systems Forum (2018): Business Intelligence and Big Data Analytics” on 22 March at the Al Fahm Hall of the University’s Cultural Centre under the patronage of H.E. Dr. Khalifa bin Abdullah Al Barwani, the CEO of National Centre for Statistics and Information.
In his welcome address, Dr. Khamis Al Yahyaee, Dean of the College of Economics & Political Science, said that the forum addresses issues related to Big Data Analytics and Business Intelligence that are of concerns to organizations and individuals. He said that the forum was aimed at creating new opportunities for academics and practitioners in private and governmental sectors to exchange their knowledge and allow for discussion on the problems and solutions in the emerging area, and raising awareness about Big Data Analytics and Business Intelligence issues.
The first keynote address on data governance and policies was delivered by Mr. Mohammed Saleh Al Farsi, Open Data Expert. Data is an important element of a wide variety of key policy documents and action plans. In this context, Al Farsi discussed the issues and analyzed the challenges associated with data governance and evaluated practical cases in Oman.
Dr. Beatriz De La Iglesia, Senior Lecturer, University of East Anglia, UK, delivered the international keynote speech on “knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) road map for BI”. KDD is an interdisciplinary area focusing upon methodologies for extracting useful knowledge from data. The ongoing rapid growth of online data due to the Internet and the widespread use of databases have created an immense need for KDD methodologies. The talk of Dr. Beatriz focused on the challenges on extracting knowledge from data and outlined major contributions of KDD field.
The forum included also two panel discussions. The first one was on “Big data and social media analytics” and included Mr. Fadi Nasser,general manager of ICT at Omantel and Mr. Mohsen Al-Shuaili, Associate Director of Social Media at Worldwide-Muscat, and moderated by Dr. Adil Al-Busaidi. The second panel discussion was on “Mobile business intelligence” included Mr. Faris Al-Kharusi, Opertions & Automation Change Manager at Petroleum Development of Oman and Mr. Saud Al-Noufli, Director of spatial data at the National Centre for Statistics and Information, and moderated by Dr. Hafedh Al-Shihi.
In her closing remarks, Dr. Kamla Al-Busaidi, Head of the Information Systems Department at SQU, said that with the transformation toward smart cities and knowledge-based economy, our aim is to stress the importance of business intelligence and big data analytics for governments and organizations and for the information systems major programs and research. “We have integrated in our B.Sc. and M.Sc. programs a set of courses(including data mining, data warehousing , decision support systems and forthcoming big data and social media analytics and data visualization) to ensure that our graduates are gaining the necessary skills that satisfy the increasing BI and data analytics job market demand”, she said. Dr. Kamla hoped that by means of the valuable presentations and discussions, the forum enabled the attendees and participants to get a better understanding of the topic and collectively reach a set of recommendations that add value to the government and industry.