Serge Druais

From IRF 2007

Serge Druais, 45, is an Ecole Polytechnique graduate with a doctorate in artificial intelligence. He joined Thales in 1989 as a project leader and held a series of operational positions with responsibilities for corporate information systems. He was information systems director (CIO) for the Thales Group from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, as head of the Group’s architecture, IT urbanisation and advanced technology teams (open-source software, web services, IT security, modelling and simulation) at Thales’s Services Division, he was instrumental in securing the Group’s role in developing and deploying the French tax administration’s online tax portal programme (impots.gouv.fr), which is emblematic of France’s commitment to e-government and is used by close to 10 million taxpayers. In 2005, as VP, Innovation for the Services Division, Serge Druais helped to establish a European dimension within Thales’s commitment to e-government.. As an extension of the NESSI initiative, Serge DRUAIS successfully advocated the creation of Thales’s own applied research facility to focus on the same technologies. ThereSIS (Thales European Research Centre for Security & Information Systems) was set up in 2006 on the Ecole Polytechnique campus near Paris. Today, Serge Druais is spearheading the drive by the Group’s research and technology department to capitalise on this experience in Asian markets. In Singapore, a regional hub for high-tech training and research, the Thales Group and the Singaporean government are studying plans for a local ThereSIS facility to consolidate and expand Singapore’s leadership in security, e-government and e-health. After several years investigating and conducting projects on the technologies most likely to drive the emergence of new citizen-centred IT applications, Serge Druais, with the backing of a major industrial group, is recognised as one of the leading specialists in e-government technologies. He is also closely involved in the work of the Club Informatique des Grandes Entreprises Françaises (CIGREF), the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Défense Nationale (IHEDN) and the Institut d’Administration des Entreprises (IAE) in Paris, la Sorbonne University, particularly in the area of competitive intelligence, information systems security and governance.