JEDDAH, 23 January — Deputy Minister of Commerce Fawaz Al-Alami has strongly favored Jeddah as the "right place" for setting up an information technology park and suggested a collective approach to meet the challenges of the Internet age.
The proposed collective approach has to be in the form of a high-level committee headed by the commerce minister and should include the finance minister, the minister of post, telegraphs and telephones, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency and the King Abdul Aziz City for Science & Technology, he said.
Al-Alami was speaking on "The emerging digital economy: A Saudi perspective" on the concluding day of the Jeddah Economic Forum yesterday.
He also suggested creation of an IT industry, revamping technical education and introduction of telecom competition. The IT age has come. There are demands for access to information on the click of a button, for all pervasive computing, for new cyberlaws and the creation of a global village. "The road ahead for the Kingdom lies in defining the vision in our mission: a lab for the future in every school and a knowledge-based industry aside, of course, from an IT park," Al-Alami said.
Certain other factors that need to be looked into are: Research and development should be focused and real, establishment of smart schools as IT think tanks, an e-government with a will and conviction and the concept of a global village with borderless marketing.
These and other measures could transform Saudi Arabia from an IT importer to an IT exporter, he said, adding the Kingdom's annual IT imports in 1999 were $2.6 billion, with local production accounting for a mere $0.6 billion.
"The Kingdom could be a major IT exporter. The government has the will and the conviction to lead and implement the vision of its mission, and to formulate, encourage and stimulate the private sector. There exist rules and regulations for a faster development of science and technology, business and investment. The onus is on the private sector to grab the opportunity and go forward," Al-Alami said.
"In the Kingdom we are setting the pace, as quickly as possible, to attain our objectives, say within two years. Malaysia, for example, is not as advanced a country as some countries in the West, but it rightly boasts that the course it has charted will make it an IT superpower by 2020. So if you create Jeddah as an IT model then surely it can be followed by others including Riyadh and Dhahran," Al-Alami added.
