ALKHOBAR, 14 January 2003 — I am delighted to bring everyone the most recent news of Pakistan’s IT prodigy, Afsah Shafquat, who has recently been honored for her efforts. In a ceremony, hosted by Teradata, a division of NCR, outstanding individuals and professionals in nine different categories related to information technology were presented gold medals and certificates for their achievements during the year 2001-2002. The event was held in Karachi on Jan. 4.
Afsah Shafquat earned the award for IT Youth. This 13-year-old has earned three world records, one of which was recently broken by her sister, Afrah. The records are: World’s youngest Sun certified Java programmer, World’s youngest Sun certified web component developer and World’s youngest IBM certified object oriented analyst and designer.
Afsah is currently helping out as a teaching assistant on the Operation Badar project at Sir Syed University. She is also adding input part-time as a developer, analyst and designer in BadarSoft. We are pleased that others have begun noticing and appreciating Afsah’s achievements and as always we at Arab News wish her and her sisters, Afrah and Isbah, all the best in the future.
Next, I would like to draw your attention to a new independent publication being distributed free of charge online. Islamic Travel Newswire edited by Imtiaz Muqbil focuses on travel and tourism to, from and within the Muslim world. If you are interested in getting onto Islamic Travel Newswire’s distribution list, send an e-mail to [email protected]. Another publication making an appearance online is the Winter 2002 issue of Saudi Aramco Technology. It has an interesting article titled, “ECC Computing Technology: The Underlying Enabler in Visualization, Geosteering and Collaboration.” Download a PDF of the article through saudiaramco.com.
We had a special visitor to Saudi Arabia this week. Klaas de Vos, vice president and GM, Europe, Middle East, and Africa for Western Digital came over from Europe to interface with his channel partners and major customers in the Kingdom. In its December 2002 edition, Maximum PC magazine, an authority on high-performance PC products, presented Western Digital with the Gear of the Year Award for the company’s 120GB model high-end EIDE 7,200 RPM WD Caviar Special Edition hard drive. Maximum PC also gave Western Digital’s 80GB WD Caviar SE model top performance honors against competitors in a roundup comparison test.
Western Digital has always done well in the Saudi market. In a telephone conversation with de Vos on Saturday, he stated that he was quite pleased with the results of his first visit to Riyadh. He was very impressed with the city’s infrastructure and the signs of progress all around, including the enormous number of buildings under construction. Frankly, I was impressed to find de Vos in the Kingdom at a time when many senior executives of multinational firms are avoiding the region due to perceived potential instability.
“One of the primary reasons I am here is due to the tremendous growth that we at Western Digital have seen in the Middle East during the past year,” said de Vos. “I have been spending most of my time in Egypt and Saudi Arabia on this trip. In 2001 the Middle East made up 10 percent of the sales in my region. In 2002 that figure went up to 18 percent. So it is a pure business sense to come out here and better understand the specific needs. Then I can go back to the company and our factories and discuss how to improve products and policies so our market share continues to grow.”
The Middle East region is a small but significant one for Western Digital. The available market here for hard drives is about 2.6 million units. Out of that number de Vos estimated that Western Digital has taken a 32 percent share or about 800,000 units.
“Saudi Arabia is our largest market after the UAE,” said de Vos. “More importantly, it is a market with a high growth potential. In 2002 there were about 450,000 hard drives sold in the Kingdom, in total. Western Digital already has 50 percent market share here and we are working to increase that number.”
Western Digital has always had a strong presence in Saudi Arabia. Unlike many other international IT firms, Western Digital has never tried to sell the Kingdom through external channels. In fact, Al-Nahil Company is one of Western Digital’s oldest partners globally. Western Digital is also represented in the Kingdom by Jamjoom Advance Technologies.
De Vos said that over the coming months, Western Digital is planning to increase its investment in the Middle East. Currently there is only one distribution center, in Amsterdam, serving the entire area under de Vos’ purview. However, Western Digital is planning to open a center in Dubai for the distribution of new units and the collection of damaged units in the Middle East. At the end of January, Western Digital’s representatives will be interviewing six different firms in Dubai in order to select one to operate the new facility.
What does de Vos foresee as the potential for hardware sales in Saudi Arabia in 2003?
“It is pure speculation, of course, but let’s remember that 2002 was not a quiet year, neither from a political nor economic point of view,” commented de Vos. “If the IT market in Saudi Arabia could see such tremendous growth in a time of such uncertainty, then I would expect that the growth would continue in 2003.”
Let’s all hope that Klaas de Vos is correct.
And now it’s time to return to an issue which resulted in a humongous amount of e-mail arriving at my inbox over the last week. To refresh everyone’s memory, I was soliciting opinions on whether it was acceptable in Saudi Arabia to use office resources to send personal e-mail. I don’t want to waste space here recounting the whole issue. If you missed last week’s article you can bring yourself up to speed by reading my comments at http://www.arabnews.com/ Article.asp?ID=21752.
I do want to share with you some of the mail I received. There was absolutely no consensus on this subject. I believe the issue will eventually be decided when the Saudi government approves legislation later this year. In the meantime, here were some readers’ thoughts — edited a bit to conserve space.
From Syed Altaf: “I have worked for major US corporations and they all have similar policies based on the idea of “don’t abuse” when it comes to using “company resources” for personal purposes. In reality a company cannot refuse to allow an employee to call his home to find out how his family is doing. He is not allowed to chat for hours, though. Just the same, a company won’t mind if you print your college assignment, which is due after work. However, an employee might get fired if he printed the whole Yellow Pages telephone directory. Common sense will tell an employee if what he is doing is abuse or not.”
From Rick Kidwell: “At my company, a grocery retailer in San Antonio, Texas, USA, it is unacceptable to use corporate e-mail for personal use. This is codified in corporate policy and can lead to termination. It occurs to me that the bigger theft is not the use of the corporate equipment and bandwidth, but the diversion of time from business to personal tasks. Presumably I am being paid to spend my time at the office for the benefit of the company. Doing otherwise would be theft of my salary.”
From Omar Syed Taiyab: “Most companies I know do not have an e-mail policy in place. There should be a clear company policy on use of e-mail, for business and personal purposes. Companies should involve HR or personnel departments in the effective implementation of such policies. No company can stop personal e-mail, neither it should attempt to do so because it will cost more to the company in other ways. However, it should be clearly stated in the policy that personal e-mails should be at a minimum. At my company, I have composed a company e-mail policy, which states DOs and DON’Ts for the users and repercussions if someone violates the policy.”
From Gulzar Wangde: “Is it theft to use corporate resources to send and receive personal e-mails? Well, I think the answer could be a yes and a no. Yes, if the corporate culture considers it so. No if otherwise. It all depends on what rules organizations follow. As for the leased lines and domain name, most companies have e-mail servers that run round the clock. And in many companies, like ours, e-mail is used as a vital channel for communication within the organization to ensure synchronized action and evade superfluous paper work. In this regard, my inbox is open from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.; when I punch my card to go home. And during this time, I think it would not do much harm to the company if I sent one odd personal e-mail in a day, would it?”
From Delal: “I was really intrigued by your article, especially that just today, I used my office LAN to download a 48.9MB file ..ehem! Well, to begin with, I believe that taking/using anything intended for work and using it for other purposes is in fact theft. However, in reality, there may be some exceptions to this rule. For example, if you stay after hours at work to enjoy the company’s heating system, which was not meant to be used for that purpose, but does remain turned on either way, then I would not call that theft. The same applies for using the network after hours, especially if you use your own laptop, like I do. And boy is the corporate network fast! You could argue that by doing this, carpets and chairs and offices wear out faster and you would be right. But ahhhhhh the network is still fast! And I promise to stand up all day tomorrow! Besides, I do not think that this is a significant expenditure.”
From Ahmed Sajid: “I do agree with your view that using an office facility for personal benefit can be considered theft. This includes all modes of communications, such as Internet, office stationary, telex, fax and courier services. After all, a cyber cafe can be used for e-mail and a document center for all other activities, but even educated, morally responsible people fail to understand this anomaly. They await Allah’s wrath on the Day of Reckoning.”
From Abdul Haq: “About your comments on the subject of personal use of corporate resources, I think you are wrong to some extent. I think you might have heard of employee privileges. When employees are on duty this doesn’t mean that they need the permission of their employer to even breath. All the employees of a firm don’t get Internet access and for the ones who do this is a privilege which they are free to use as they please, as long as they don’t waste a lot of time or affect the company’s work. If you talk about using corporate e-mail as theft, then all of these are theft if they are done on the job: 1. smoking a cigarette; 2. going out to the rest room; 3. talking about something not related to your company with your colleagues; 4. using your company’s post box for personal letters. Molouk, I hope you don’t become the manager of any organization. Otherwise you will torture your subordinates with funny rules and create a constricted work environment.”
From Om: “Using office resources for sending personal mails should not be viewed as stealing, but should be considered as a goodwill gesture from employers. When I was working in Uganda our employer had a dedicated e-mail address, telephone line and an Internet connection in the staff room for the employees.”
Well, now that you’ve all had your say, I’ll tell you the bad news. I believe that many companies in the Kingdom are going to implement corporate e-mail policies this year. I don’t think personal use will be completely banned, but it will be extremely limited. It’s a necessity because Internet abuse is getting extreme. Too much time is being wasted distributing jokes, pornography and other assorted trash over e-mail from office to office.
Plus sometimes e-mail abuse is damaging to corporate credibility. For example, last year someone sent a message out to their friends, using their corporate mail account, giving details about a bombing in Riyadh. The bombing they described was fiction, a rumor started on the grapevine. But once it was out there in e-mail, news of the phoney incident spread like wildfire. And it was just as hard to stop after the report was found to be false. Even worse, away from their computers nobody remembered the name of the man who started the e-mail rumor. They did remember the name of the company he worked for though, because it was on his e-mail.
Surveillance software, which checks on computer usage, potentially down to individual keystrokes, is already being installed on corporate machines everywhere. If you don’t like the idea of losing your job due to e-mail abuse there is a choice. Go to a cyber cafe, set up a free e-mail account and tell all your friends to use it instead of your corporate address.
(Comments to [email protected].)
