Digital Transformation Summit organised by Bloomberg Adria

It was a real pleasure to visit Bloomberg Adria’s conference in the beautiful setting of Grand Plaza hotel in Ljubljana.

Refreshing deviation from cyber attacks and NIS2 news and conferences were the main presented panels:

1. The rise of generative artificial intelligence
2. Challenges of the digital transformation
3. Cloud services as platform for digital development or “Are we rich enough to do this ourselves?”
4. Key digitalisation process and vision for future

Main speaker of first panel was mr. Sven Doelle, director of innovation and technology at Adobe CEE, who was challenged to answer quite witty questions asked by moderator mr. Daniel Fazlić. “What keeps you awake at night?” (The answer was deepfake.)

Challenges of digital transformation were tackled by speakers who are involved in decision making in their areas which are quite critical:
Alenka Kolar, general manager of the Directorate for the digitalisation of healthcare keeps facing directive upon directive, self-ecsclusive information in formal documents and fighting a lot of bureaucracy. One of the main challenges is digitalise old databases, join with new and keep that continuation. She also presented interesting practices like, slovenian heart surgeons 3D printing exact replica of the patients heart to plan the surgery.
Uroš Salobir, director of strategic innovations at ELES is emphasizing that time to plan the built of those 30 to 40 electric car chargers is now!
Miha Praunseis, ceo for information technology at the Petrol explained how many factors need to be considered for Petrol’s projects and mentioned latest projects like Petrol Go app.
Zdravka Zalar, CEO at Smartis shared detailed insight that most organisations are sticking with combined cloud+on prem deployments of the technologies that they use.  She also provided information how newest generations are deciding about new jobs.

Speakers of the 2nd panel addressed possible solutions for ensuring continuous operation and digital development:
Vesna Prodnik member of the board responsible for digitization at Telekom Slovenija emphasized how local presence is extremely important for Telekom, for reliability, continuous operation, and compliance with local legislation.
Julij Božič, cloud sales director of Oracle Slovenija had some awakening news how much infrastructure costs and why is the cloud the simplest and easiest decision. Also interesting was information about the frequency of cyber attacs and how they do not present any threat due to good security.
Blaž Suhač business developer at PRO.Astec is emhpasizing what was result of a survey also: a clear vision what is the main goal of digitalisation.
Igor Zorko, vice president of Slovenian chamber of commerce and president of eHealth section at the Asociation for informatics and telecommunication shared clear statement: companies need to spend their time doing their core business and not dealing with IT and servers. Eye opening was his request for a reliable partnership with the state and faster movement.  “There is less money for this than in the past. We have 15 million euros available for the entire period of 5 to 6 years.”
Damir Abdić, manager of Factoring sector at the Gorenjska banka explained how smooth is their digitized cloud for Factoring services.

Key projects of digitalisation and vision for future was adressed in third panel by:
Bojan Radlovič, chief digitalisation officer at Fortenova Group and president of the board of MultiPlusCard who wake us up with the fact that digitalisation is not a project but an ongoing process. Interesting was insight how tough cookies are Slovenian grocery shoppers who go to 5,6 grocery stores, compared to Croatian (and the rest of Balkan), who usually go to 2 stores. Interesting was also plan to do a pilot project of autonomous grocery store.
Gregor Kovačič, executive director of the section of user experience and digitalisation at Zavarovalnica Triglav, shared their newest project, Tria, their virtual assistant and explained interaction with the client.
Jakob Kotnik from Sinecon mentioned how trends are moving from having all services attached to system like ERP to having separate and the best service for each company department and how they need to cooperate between themselves.
Iztok Juvan, director of Adriatic region of BE-terna shared experiences from the public and private sectors. He mentioned that sometimes, IT improvements are planned by general managemet and then the main information do not get down to the last employee whose work will be affected by their decisions.
Niko Medved, Deputy director of Plastika Skaza made logical point that they are experts in plastic molding (not IT segment company) and warned that if you include key stakeholders too late in the digitalisation, you may end up setting the digital strategy incorrectly. “The corporate goal is that every employee can make faster decisions at any time based on reliable and timely information.”

The whole event was an amazing insight what key companies are currently dealing with and working on at the moment.

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