Full Biodata
Lilyana Abdul Latiff graduated from University of Iowa, a prestigious US school with Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in December 1995. Lilyana received her first employment at Malaysian Institute of Microelectronics Systems (MIMOS) as a Research Officer under the National IT Council (NITC) Secretariat. At NITC, she was heavily involved in the coordinating, organizing and research for the yet-announced Malaysian Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC). During her time at MIMOS, Lilyana had the opportunity to work closely with many key founders and think tanks of MSC including various task forces that provided key input to the initial planning and rollout of the MSC.
Lilyana later joined Intaha Consulting – a local bumiputera consulting firm headed by Dr Nik Rushdi Nik Hassan, as an Information Specialist. As part of the initial pioneer team, Lilyana had the opportunity to work on many projects including the development of the first office administration and HR system for Inland Revenue Board (IRB), in which she designed and developed some 18 Lotus Notes applications for nationwide rollout. In her 2 and half years with Intaha, Lilyana successfully managed BPI/Change Management projects, developed business plans, technical proposals and provided technical advisory to clients in both private and government sector. Her other notable achievements include business planning and proposal development for three MSC flagship consortiums for Smart School, Telemedicine and E-Government, and Aims Technology – which resulted in the founding of two other business ventures. Lilyana was also instrumental in a software audit exercise for HUKM – to identify development problems in the hospital’s management information system.
Spurred on by her entrepreneurial spirit, successful consulting stint and passion for education and technology, Lilyana joined the new Aims Technology venture known as Fortus Gen, to begin R&D on an Integrated Learning System (ILS) based on Java. She was later absorbed into the main shareholding company as MinaOnline manager – which is a web-based online learning platform. As MinaOnline manager she was responsible over the development, marketing and business development of the corporate learning portal. Her projects also include Instructional Design and Content Development for several corporate and academic organizations in Klang Valley.
Seeking new personal challenges, Lilyana decided to found her own corporate learning and business consultancy company known as Aleph One. Aleph One specializes as a one stop training centre for corporate level training and education. It has 3 other secondary divisions: Events & Communications, New Media and ICT. Aleph One has strong partnerships in areas of training, business consulting and technology implementation – borne out of Lily’s network of associates developed throughout her career. Clients of Aleph One include Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Maybank, PETRONAS, ECER Development Council, Bridgestone, Multimedia Synergy Corp, Rotaract Club, UKM, DigiEra, MARDEC, Galeri Petronas and more.
Between the years 2010 and 2014, Lilyana became a co-founding partner of Joota.com – a multi-million dollar technology company that developed a social content network. As CTO of Joota, Lilyana architected the social content platform from the ground up and worked with geographically dispersed team from Indonesia, China and the United States. Joota was even presented to L.A. Reid of Sony Music as a potential platform for brand and fan management for X-Factor tv show. During her time at Joota, Lilyana developed technical experience in many new technologies such as cloud platforms, big data analytics, social graphs, and graph databases.
Since then, Lilyana has returned to the market providing CTO-As-A-Service to several tech startups, and was asked to helm a startup foundation called New Entrepreneurs Foundation of Malaysia (or MyNEF) and also became the chairperson of ASEAN Rice Bowl Startup Awards which is a regional awards for startups and ecosystem players.
Under her leadership, the ASEAN Rice Bowl Startup Awards have garnered over 2000+ nominations each year; a long-term partnership with the Global Startup Awards (based in Denmark) – that clears a path for a startup in a village in South East Asia to compete all the way to a global platform; national partnerships via ecosystem players in all 10 ASEAN countries and maintains a database of over 400 tech and startup VCs and investors regionally.
Lilyana was an active member of PayNet’s Industry Advisory Panel (IAP), and MDEC’s Innovative Policy Council. She was also appointed by the Minister of MESTECC as part of a special purpose task force to review Malaysia’s Startup Funding Ecosystem which kick-started the streamlining of grants, funds, and investment strategies for tech startups across major MESTECC agencies such as Cradle Fund, MAVCAP, Malaysia Debt Ventures, MTDC and others.
Lilyana currently helms BETA Foundation and Jooblii Commerce sdn bhd that focuses on connecting-the-dots for businesses and digital adoption. She has a wide network of partners and associates in business, funding and technology. She truly believes that for South East Asia to gain a global position as an economic bloc, the countries within ASEAN needs to harness digital and tech strategies across all of their verticals including agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, education, health and others.
last updated: August 2021
