The Bahrain International eGovernment Forum 2014 ended yesterday (April 23) with more than 5,000 delegates and 67 leading speakers taking part in the seventh edition of the event.

The forum  was held under the patronage of Deputy Prime Minister and Supreme Committee for Information and Communication Technology chairman Shaikh Mohammed bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, reported the Gulf Daily News, our sister publication.

The opening ceremony was attended by 850 delegates and saw the launch of the National Portal Plus and the honouring of the eGovernment Excellence Award 2014 winners.

Yesterday, the forum continued the seven parallel workshops along with the eighth workshop titled Innovation and Entrepreneurship in ICT Environment Forum which was part of its activities.

Two days of specialised workshops running alongside the Bahrain International eGovernment Forum 2014 also concluded yesterday.

Topics related to enterprise IT governance for control and value creation, social media toolkit, leadership in information technology, eContent management, eGovernment success stories and global trends, mobile apps, along with agile business analysis and improvements were discussed.

The "Mobile Apps" workshop revealed that the number of smart devices sold worldwide every day outweighs the number of babies born.

The workshop conducted by Thinslices founder and chief operating officer Ilie Ghiciuc and Hppy founder and chief executive Vlad Bodi highlighted the rising penetration of tablet devices that surpasses the sales of smart mobile phones. They recommended that specific design criteria features must be taken into account, in addition to observing the most important global trends in the mobile phone sector.

The "Social Media Toolkit" workshop was presented by Mindshare MENA social media director Richard Fitzgerald along with Logicks.com director of digital marketing and social media Abbas Alidina.

It focused on key statistics on social media networks.

For instance, there are millions of active social media users in the world, and most materials adaptive for publication through desktop computers are unsuitable for display in social communication platforms.

Moreover, they explained that the content of the websites of famous global brands such as Volvo and Coca-Cola are not compatible with social networks, and this explains the shift towards mobile apps.

The "eContent Management" workshop was conducted by three top notch speakers in the field; Take Off PR managing partner Martin Bredl, Clipatize founder and chief executive Jakub (Kuba) Lebuda and Social Marketing New Media Agency founder and chief executive Mathias Haas.

The speakers focused on the best practices and latest approaches of planning the content creation, delivery and governance, as well as the means to develop a strategy that helps achieve organisational goals by maximising the impact of content.

In the "Enterprise IT Governance for Control and Value Creation" workshop, HULT International Business School director action projects Phillip Sparks, Adam Global Consultancy eGovernment and organisational change consultant and facilitator Jenny Tsuboyama discussed hypothetical real world experiences from the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, the framework for corporate governance of information technology, the components of the institutional framework and governance standards that enable management to achieve harmony between the enterprise IT strategy and objectives of the overall strategy in order to make correct decisions.

During the "eGovernment Success Stories and Global Trends" workshop attended by specialists, government officials and senior officials from private sector companies, leading experiences of GCC countries in the field of eGovernment were reviewed.

The participants were also briefed on the successful story of the eGovernment in the UK that was presented by British government adviser and former deputy chief information officer Andrew Stott, who addressed the fundamentals that underpin eGovernment in the UK, namely, open data, the default digital world, the common approach to infrastructure, control projects, and innovation.

Dr Zakareya Ahmed Al Khaja, presented a working paper on "National Governance Framework: Towards Efficient Use of IT" and displayed Bahrain's experience in effective use of technology to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of IT usage as part of eGovernment strategy objectives and in line with the country's Economic Vision 2030.

The participants of "Agile Business Analysis and Improvements" workshop were exposed to the advanced agile methodologies utilising "Scrum framework".

On the first day of the workshop, De Montfort University's head of software technology research laboratory Dr Helge Janicke and business intelligence support John Moore provided guidance for effective and innovative process improvement activities in the organisation, highlighting key figures and statistics from recent reports on main social media platforms.

Finally, International Practice head Algirde Pipikaite led a workshop entitled "Leadership in Information Technology". – TradeArabia News Service