SAS Institute rates Global Leaders Africa Summit a huge success

The Global Leaders Africa Summit, for which SAS was a major sponsor, and which was held in Johannesburg at the end of June, was a huge success, merging the minds of several world leaders and some of the country's leading businessmen.

Says Bill Hoggarth, Managing Director of SAS South Africa: "It gives me great pleasure watching the marrying of the minds of international leaders with local businessmen, leaders and government officials. The summit was a constructive sharing of minds where we could look to the future of South Africa as an emerging economy and fully see the potential within."

The key messages delivered by the among others former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; Carly Fiorina, the former chairwoman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard; Scott Bedbury, former marketing chief for Nike and Starbucks; Wiseman Nkuhlu, former Economic Advisor to Thabo Mbeki and Chief Executive of NEPAD included:

* Innovate
* Measure
* Are you accountable?
* Do you deliver on promises?
* Share vision and information with everyone
* Believe that success is everyone's responsibility

"It was clear that without the ability to innovate, measure and move forward, we will be left behind. Perhaps more importantly is our ability to as companies and indeed as a country and continent, ensure that we deliver on the promises we make to our investors, stakeholders and our citizens," adds Hoggarth.

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"The exciting part of the core messages for us at SAS is the link back into our own enterprise intelligence offerings - real business intelligence solutions can start taking the raw data and through analytics provide concrete roadmaps against which management and leadership can plot their future strategies."

The underlying tone of the summit was that without the above in place, countries and indeed companies would not be able to enjoy transformational success.

A thread which clearly ran through the majority of presentations was that many tasks and processes in the diagnostics and predictability contexts, specifically are rapidly becoming automated. This trend is moving the major role of business and government from managing process to innovation and ensuring that accountability is in place.