JEDDAH: By the end of the current five-year economic plan, it is hoped that the Kingdom will have complete e-governance services. Ali Al-Soma, Director General of the Saudi e-government program, Yesser, made this statement Monday while speaking to an audience of senior managers and experts from the telecom and IT industries at the Saudi Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Conference which is underway at the Jeddah Center for Forums and Events. The ICT Strategic Conference and the Saudi Office Expo, which are being held at the same time, were opened on Sunday evening. Al-Soma said that 1,000 e-services have been provided to people from 126 government sectors, and no single ministry has refused to use e-services. “However, there are a lot of challenges, but definitely it will come soon because it is receiving wide support. Though Saudi e-government lacks sufficient human resources, skilled staff and strong leadership to introduce much needed change and impact, we hope that by the end of the five-year plan in 2015, Saudi Arabia will adopt complete e-governance services,” he said. Saudi ICT has been designed to provide insight into the current structure and framework of the communication and information technology infrastructure in the Kingdom. The session titled “Realizing the full potential of ICTs” was chaired by Jasem Al-Mutawa, Saudi Country Manager for Gartner. The panel included eminent personalities from the telecom industry including CEO of Etihad Atheen GO, Raed Kayal and STC's VP for Business Enterprise, Samir Matboly. Matboly in his opening address stressed the role of a strong ICT infrastructure. He said: “Just as the streets and roads in a country are the essence of a strong infrastructure, in the same way socio-economic drivers like businesses, innovation and technology depend on a strong ICT infrastructure.” He described how high bandwidth Internet is required for advanced ICT services. “STC's target for 2011 is to make 20Mbps Internet available to every home,” he said. He said that STC hopes to provide higher quality service and delivery. “STC will continue to invest in infrastructure to develop advanced services for Saudi Arabia as we hope to make it a hub of ICT services,” he added. Al-Mutawa, said that there was an industry-wide need “to share and collaborate” in order to build a more effective and efficient ICT infrastructure that could place the Kingdom on the global ICT landscape. Cameron Rejali, Managing Director Products, British Telecom Wholesale, said: “Technology may be interesting to us as engineers but not to our customers. They are interested in services.” During a Saudi ICT panel on knowledge-based economy, Dr. Abdulaziz Al-Hargan, Director of Badir, a business incubation program at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), said that there was a massive problem in the Kingdom's innovation ecosystem that had to be resolved in order to encourage innovation at all levels. “There are no bridges between stakeholders. Education, finance, labor are all massive systems that are unfortunately working in isolation from one another. They are doing pathbreaking work, but they are doing it silently. They need to collaborate,” he said. Dr. Mamdouh Al-Najjar, Deputy GM, Education and Corporate Social Responsibility at Microsoft Arabia, talked about the dynamic nature of learning and education in Saudi Arabia and the changing nature of ICT. He described the dilemma of “whether to serve students with different styles of learning differently, or do we do a one-size-fits-all”. “Cloud computing,” he said, “ is the future of infrastructure”. He defined cloud computing as Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, as with the electricity grid. Al-Najjar told Saudi Gazette about Microsoft Arabia's Corporate Social Responsibility Project - live@edu, by which Microsoft provides infrastructure to set up and host free email accounts for students and universities. He talked about the need to “enhance learning communities” and said that the future of education will be personalized learning, “where everything is customized to the individual needs of students”. Raul Zambrano, Senior Policy Advisor UNDP, described how economies around the world are trying to answer similar questions that Saudi Arabia faces as it comes face to face with a high-growth rate in the consumption of communication technology. “If the Kingdom is to be an ICT hub, it needs to encourage innovation and encourage policies that entitle people to become innovators,” he said. The conference and exhibition continues on Tuesday when Elias Bayeh, VP of Gartner Executive Program, will provide an insight into how a new ICT landscape can provide better opportunities for the future. There will also be a discussion of how to improve the ICT ecosystem, and a dedicated panel to discuss enterprise communications that will evaluate the impact of current networking systems on the Saudi business fraternity. There will also be a special presentation by Fawaz A. Farooqui, Supervisor of Network Operations Center at Saudi Aramco, who will describe how Saudi Aramco's oil and gas drilling operations can receive tremendous support if they take advantage of satellite enabled communication networks.
