CIO Jasim Abdul Rahman uses centralization to power up Power International Holding

Centralizing technology in an organization that has 400 legal entities, operates in 25 countries across 15 different industries as distinct as dairy production, telecommunications, and real estate sounds impossible. Jasim Abdul Rahman, Group CIO for Power International Holding in Qatar, has delivered just that in his seven years with the organization.

Power International Holding employs over 65,000 staff and describes itself as a diversified conglomerate. The business has six core business areas: energy, concessions and construction, industries and services, telecommunication and technology, agriculture and food industries, real estate, and finally lifestyle, which covers hospitality, entertainment, and catering. Within these, there are companies doing everything from medical care, mining, oil production, and construction. The CIO describes it as nicely diversified when he met with diginomica at a recent Gartner event.

It was a year of phenomenal growth. Every four days, we opened a legal entity.

Power International Holding is expanding rapidly, forging new energy, telecommunications, healthcare, IT, mining, and metallurgical investments in Kazakhstan, for example. It is playing a central part in rebuilding the economy of Syria after years of civil war, one aspect of which is the development of solar power plants.

The Middle East is diversifying its economy, and nations like Qatar are seen as central to the growth and diversification of nearby nations in Africa and Central Asia. The CIO says the interest and conversation focused on technology in these regions is intense. He adds that Qatar's place in the world economy, acting as a diplomatic bridge between the economies of the West and the East, is fueling the opportunity for both the nation and his organization.

With legal entities being launched every four days, the CIO has had to continually find ways to improve and accelerate processes. Examples include agents that create the records and ledgers in SAP for each new entity the company forms, freeing up their staff to do more complex tasks.

The CIO has centralized technology across this enormous conglomerate, and he has done it in a way to serve the speed and adaptability the business requires. He explains how it is structured:

There are lots of pieces of a business that are horizontal, such as finance, human resources (HR), IT, and sourcing. Where there is a niche function for an industry, we deliver that within that vertical.

Therefore, the technology fits the six core operating areas of the Power International Holding business. He adds:

We are a large SAP house, and we have built industrial models for each in SAP. I can roll out a construction or hospitality model in Saudi Arabia, Albania, or Qatar. That makes this growth a lot easier.

Centers of excellence, which the CIO calls divisions, manage the templates and technology delivery within a vertical. A business solutions group manages the overall SAP S/4 Hana estate, which is on Rise. There are also divisions for digital products, engineering, support, cybersecurity, and a Strategic Office that manages any large technology investments. Each template includes everything needed to comply with and deliver business metrics. He says:

We can do an SAP rollout for a new entity in two hours, down from six weeks. I am super proud of my team.

An AI technology stack

Alongside this high level of standardization, he has specialist teams for sectors such as telecoms or healthcare, as some sectors have a high demand for specialist technology implementations.

Incredibly, this is all done by a team of 200 - 100 full-time employees and 100 contractors. The CIO says:

I have been told we are too small by some advisory firms.

He has been with Power International Holding since May 2018 and has been working on the modernization and simplification of the technology estate to get to today's position, he says:

When I came into the company, we had 15 different ERPs and 25 entities. Fast forward to now, and we have 400 entities in 25 countries and one ERP.

His consolidation onto the cloud-based SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform has been alongside the modernization of technology infrastructure. Power International Holding has a hybrid cloud infrastructure, which was chosen for both sovereignty and technical viability reasons. With a growing telecoms business operating in markets that demand sovereignty and expansion into emerging markets, a significant owned and operated on-premise estate, as well as private cloud, is vital. He says:

In sectors like telecoms and healthcare, it is super important for us to guarantee data residency.

Like a growing number of CIOs in Europe and the US, the CIO has recently transitioned his hybrid cloud infrastructure away from a VMware three-tier estate. As with others diginomica has spoken to, he found the price increases by VMware since its acquisition by Broadcom to be unacceptable. In addition, the CIO was looking for infrastructure that would support an AI technology stack.

The ambition and pace of Power International Holding meant the business needed a hub for AI innovation. This hub enables employees to use AI with the right levels of safety and governance.

Having assessed the market, Power International Holding deployed an AI platform using Nutanix Enterprise AI services to run and govern the large language models (LLMs) across the entire group. This provides open-source LLM inference services that have role-based access controls, integration monitoring, and managed API endpoints. This ensures his team knows that AI is standardized. Also, the development teams access AI on a path that has been sanctioned. This prevents shadow AI from arising and vital business or customer data from leaking onto unapproved AI and software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms. He says this has enabled business units to develop AI prototypes, including chatbots and copilots.

For certain verticals in the Power International Holding conglomerate, this secure and governed approach to AI is enabling innovation, he says:

In healthcare, we are using AI ambient listening, which is allowing our doctors to see 15 to 20% more patients a day. We can tell them that all of the appointment notes and recordings are safe and within our environment.

Moving away from a three-tier architecture has reduced complexity by 60%, the CIO says.

My take

As an avid reader of The Economist, I have been following the rapid pace of business development in the Middle East and Central Asia. Meeting a CIO who is right in the midst of the rapid, technology-driven growth of this region was fascinating. As ever with business, there were shared struggles, shadow technology, and duplication, for example, but also an opportunity to do things in new ways and at a major scale. This will be a CIO, company, and market that it will be a must to keep an eye on.