Saudi Arabia’s journey to achieving virtualisation and e-Governance is making progress, and according to the latest UN e-Readiness Ranking the country has advanced significantly to 41st position worldwide out of 192 member countries.
This is largely due to leadership and support from the very top. It includes the establishment of the Saudi e-Government Program (Yesser), the creation of a national portal called Saudi (www.saudi.gov.sa), and a National Contact Centre (Amer) which provides relevant support for services offered by government agencies.
Leadership took centre stage on day two of the 4th Annual Kingdom e-Government Summit, organised by French deal facilitation group naseba and supported by Yesser. Eng Ahmed Al Khairy, Deputy Director General of Yesser; Christian Rupp, Federal Executive Secretary and Spokesperson from the Federal Chancellery of Austria; and Dr Ramazan Altinok, Chief of e-Government Advisory Group and CIO from the Prime Minister’s Office – Turkey, shared their expertise on how leadership influences and realises objectives which lead to successful e-Government implementation.
Eng Ahmed explained: “Unification is happening across the GCC due to similarities in language, culture and the way of life. A CIO committee was formulated across the region to ensure citizens can cross borders without problems. But this committee cannot solve everything — we need you [the people] to work with us to do things the way you want. The message today is you can make a difference and work together with the government to create the ultimate customer satisfaction.
Eng Ahmed appreciated the efforts of Abu Dhabi Systems & Information Centre (ADSIC) on launching smart government, allowing all government services to be available via a mobile phone. He asked all attending government officials to follow their model, just launched last week. ADSIC was represented by their Business Information Manager Khaled Al Mazrouei.
Giving a European perspective, Christian Rupp noted: “The citizen portal established by Austria was the first ePortal in the whole of Europe in 1997; designed in such a way that it is ‘technology neutral’ so that it is not limited to people using only one mode of communication, but to everyone — even people who don’t own the infrastructure.”
Saudi Arabia’s government also recognises the importance of enterprise architecture and national enterprise architecture, both of which are key elements of the National e-Government Plan led by Yesser. It comprises of elements including processes, procedures, policies, methodology, framework, standards and reference models.
This area was debated and examined by Dr Pallab Saha, Senior Research Fellow & Enterprise Architecture Evangelist from National University of Singapore; Pierdomenico Iannarelli, Regional Manager Italy & GME of Microfocus; and Eng Abdulmageed Al Ajaji, Director – ICT, Saudi Industrial Property Authority. They also highlighted the Kingdom’s achievements in enterprise architecture.
“Enterprise architecture is thought of as an IT function, but to be eventually take it to the next level we need to use it to actually communicate through each department and the entire enterprise. Enterprise architecture should be used as a planning tool to simplify complexities,” noted Eng Abdulmageed.
“The imperatives for connected government to be brought in by leaders include initiation in right areas for transformation, redefinition of enterprise architecture, harnessing the power of tackling complexity, intervening to influence complex systems to minimise unintended coherence, and addressing institutional constraints,” added Dr Pallab.