15FeatUre Q You were the first woman appointed as the managing director of Microsoft Malaysia and in 2014 you were appointed as the CEO of MDEC Would you say more women are participating in the IT industry now What is your advice to women looking to succeed in the IT industry I have always been a firm believer in diversity and that includes gender Female empowerment is a topic very close to my heart And ICT provides opportunities for women to contribute economically not only on an individual level but also towards national development As I see it right now a key issue in female empowerment is not in terms of skills but in terms of a better channel to work life balance The internet serves as a market access enabler and there is no reason corporates should not leverage on this in order to tap into the female work force when traditional methods may instead isolate them My hope is for MDEC to be known as an agency that catalyses and opens the eyes of the industry in the country spurring them to consider flexible and agile solutions instead of sticking with tried and true As they say if there is no change there is an illusion of safety when in reality the whole world is sprinting past you My hope is also all segments and communities of the country will be participants of the digital economy to fulfil their aspirations To quote Johan Mahmood of TalentCorp Our nation deserves great ambitions I fully subscribe to it and intend to contribute towards those ambitions God Willing What we are projecting is that Malaysia needs to have 1 500 data scientists the real top tier end of the whole ecosystem by the year 2020 and supported by 16 000 data professionals Yes we are doing that building data science curriculum in universities not only within the computing and engineering tracks but to also embed Data Analytics as a skill throughout the other disciplines such as business finance actuarial science and so on The other components of the dance floor include developing initiatives to embrace the richness of open data sharing and shared enterprise data At the end of the day though whatever transformation needs to happen needs to be driven by the private sector We as government can only create the dancing floor but the actual dancing is still with the private sector Q According to MSC Malaysia s website to date there are more than 3 600 MSC status companies from more than 40 countries operating in Malaysia What are the issues frequently faced by these companies How does MDEC deal with these issues To your question I cannot stress enough the importance of scaling up local companies into global icons We do have them in our fold the likes of Silverlake a renowned solutions provider for the global fintech industry Fusionex a multi award winning Analytics and Big Data company that is based in Malaysia and listed in the London Stock Exchange Even Jobstreet had its humble beginnings as an MSC company before being acquired Datuk Yasmin Mahmood is the CEO of MDeC In this light the MDEC GAIN Global Acceleration Innovation Network initiative aims to identify companies that have the potential to be accelerated into major global icons such as Sedania Innovator and iPay88 Through our newly set up Silicon Valley office we have successfully connected 21 of such companies to the SV ecosystem of mentors accelerators and venture capitalists VCs Hence there is a critical need to fast track local MSC companies to enter and compete in the global marketplace That said it s also important that we help smaller local companies with technologies at the heart of today s digital disruption to scale up Companies like Speedminer that delivers sentiment analysis technology and Neuramatix a pioneering machine learning company are amongst those that MDEC has successfully nurtured

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