COMDEX Saudi Arabia opens today with a hip hip hurray. However, where is Saudi Arabia headed in its use of information technology? I wish we knew.
Yes, the government, businesses and consumers keep buying hardware and software. They buy more and more servers and solutions, and they put them together and make them work, somehow. But what is the return on all this investment? There are no numbers, but I am certain that the ROI is inadequate when one considers the amounts being spent.
I recently discovered that at one Saudi chamber of commerce not more than 10 percent of the registered businesses had made an e-mail address available for communication with the chamber’s members services department. This demonstrates that the majority of small and medium-sized enterprises in the Kingdom are still unable or unwilling to engage in e-business. Since that chamber of commerce is not yet an e-chamber, it can’t act as a driver to motivate SME’s to get online. And therein lies the problem.
We still have no national IT plan that government departments, businesses and individuals can refer to when making choices about information technology. We have no driver with central authority to make the decisions about IT that benefit us most as a nation. It is almost unbelievable but at this moment individual departments within our government and even individual sections within departments are spending millions of riyals on IT investments and there is no assurance that they are the right investments.
The IT vendors are currently driving the IT decisions in the Saudi market and this is not a good thing, not for us and in the end, not for them. You see, at first in the rush to e-business and e-government the vendors will do well. Products across the available spectrum will be purchased and a lot of money will be spent. But then businesses and governmental organizations will be stuck with many different platforms and solutions that won’t work together effectively and efficiently. Suddenly, investment in IT will slow down, because no one will know how to move forward without spending even more funds that no one will have. At that point, everyone becomes a loser. IT only succeeds when it accomplishes goals effectively and efficiently.
There has been talk for years about the development of our national IT plan. We urgently need more than talk. We need direction now.
