1. It was late afternoon, 43 C o outside when some user was yelling over the phone saying “where
is the IT Engineer? You guys are not here most of the time and we are the ones who are doing
the work. Because of you our jobs get delayed!”
Immediately, I investigated this complaint to realize that the IT Engineer was in his car,
commuting between Three subsidiaries/sites. While he is responsible for supporting more than
150 computers collectively, instantly he told me “Are you talking about Mr. K? Yes I have
received his ticket and he is requesting to connect his personal laptop to the company network
and as you know, this is in violation with the security standards!”
Although, we are here to support everyone, we cannot breach corporate security standards nor
compromise the continuity of business.
As our valued users, your precious data should never been hacked. Do you know that we
prevented more than 2ooo hacking attempts and 42,000 virus attacks during last month from
having access to your data and your emails! Probably you heard about the LinkedIn Company
that recently got hacked.
Probably you recognized that the corporate email started showing pictures of the staff involved
in the correspondence, which is a first step towards a big project of unified communication,
which will enable you to have paperless efaxing, group global extension, and instant massages.
Depa Tel project is offering free international phone calls, it will reduce the overseas telephone
bills tremendously, as a start we are saving now almost 35%. We are working to make it evolves
more to cover all sites and subsidiaries in the near future.
On the development side, our team is working in DIG implementation of Oracle supply chain,
manufacturing , projects, and operations with vast support from the GM, Mr. Abdallah himself.
In parallel, our Oracle finance team is about to finish the implementation of Oracle financeat
Eldiar. Carrara is next as per our roll out plan.
Lindner Middle East ran their first payroll in Oracle HR last month. More than 900 real projects
got estimated through RIB and we are revamping the infrastructure of PinoMeroni Egypt to
start RIB implementation to streamline estimation processes next month.Executive
dashboardshave been delivered to hundred plus managers and decision makers across the
group to give them real-time data and visual insights of the big picture of our business.
For sites, our Primavera contract manager (PCM ) has accommodated to date more than 512
active projects, covering all subsidiaries from Depa Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Deco, DIG, India, Qatar,
and Jordan It enabled them to streamline their processes of transmittal, submittal,
correspondence, RFI, drawings, material logs … etc. For planners we upgraded P6 to the latest
version release 8, integrating it with Oracle projects and contract manager to have smooth
transition between commercial, engineering and planning departments.
Some of you are occasionally facing issues related to slowness of IT services. On this regards,
we have upgraded many of the backbones of our subsidiaries wherever the Internet provider
can provide higher and more stable connection. However, in some cases like the DFC site in
Dubai, Cararra, Yas Island projects, MIAL India, Cakapsarc KAPSARC in KSA, and Baku in

2. Azerbaijan we were handicapped due to internet provider limitation. In regards to slowness of
old computers, we have proposed a program to gradually program to replace old machines
with new ones.
Aligning with the new business strategy of managing overseas projects from several locations
around the world, “Depa cloud” project is coming to enable virtual teams to work on multiple
projects together and getting their data anywhere anytime in a secure and safe environment.
Like last year, IT department is offering for Depa employees to have Microsoft Office package
for $9.90 instead of $370 for home use.
We are planning to arrange an auction to sell all the old computers, printers and screens on
Saturday July 7th 2012 Saturday. A further notification will be announced.
Although there was a huge reduction in man power of our department, which definitely has
had its impact on the response time, but still we used latest technologies to cover the gap. We
have celebrated closing the IT service desk ticket no. 80,000 last April. All those tickets got
tracked and escalated through a world renowned monitoring tool to make sure all the problems
got addressed on a timely manner. Big thanks to all of you our users who made this happened
by using our IT service desk system to report your IT problems. This didn’t prevent us from
measuring the level of user satisfaction through our quarterly survey, which we will continue
with our latest survey (number 21). Further we are having dedicated meetings after each survey
to discuss the comments and feedback and take the possible required corrective actions.
At the end big thanks to all of you who supported us, and was patient withour delays and
mistakes, and we are assuring you that everybody in the IT Department is working hard to
make your daily work easier, faster, safer, within budget and to stay @ your service
Ali Kekhia
Group IT director
Depa