Saudi Arabia: where digital transformation is a matter of state
Last week I had the opportunity to spend a few days delivering a course at the Prince Mohammad Bin Salman College (MBSC) of Business & Entrepreneurship to thirty-five senior executives at the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) in Saudi Arabia . The course title was “Leading digital transformation” (pdf).
I don’t give many courses outside of IE Business School, and on previous occasions I have declined such invitations because of the constraints and pressures of my own teaching load, but this opportunity seemed to me unique and culturally interesting: Saudi Arabia is undergoing a transformation at the hands of young people educated abroad and who have been exposed to an uncensored internet. At the same time, there are any number of ambitious projects underway, such as construction of cities from scratch, with the idea of turning them into centers of economic activity in the context of the so-called Vision 2030, an ambitious plan to reduce dependence on oil and transform the Kingdom into a diversified and strong economy in sectors such as health, education, construction, leisure and tourism.
The institution that invited me, MBSC, is one of the first highly participative, mixed classes in a city under construction that is much more open, with no religious police, and women do not wear the abaya, etc. These changes may seem timid from a Western perspective in a country where women still cannot drive (something that has been talked about for a very long time and everything indicates will soon change), but that must be understood in context and as part of an unequivocal transformation process. Slow, yes, but in the right direction.
Coinciding with my stay there, Facebook director of AI Research, Yann LeCun, publicly declined through Facebook an invitation to teach a course at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) because of the country’s laws on atheism. My decision, taking into account that I had intended to quote LeCun widely anyway, was to use his letter to feed discussion in class about the importance of transformation. Not long ago, discussions of this kind in a participatory and open format would have been virtually impossible in a classroom in Saudi Arabia. LeCun’s letter offered a unique opportunity to discuss it at the right time, and my impression is that LeCun, an extremely intelligent person, knew that his denial, in the context of Saudi educational institutions trying to modernize the country at all costs, would likely generate debate.
I have always believed that it is good to be where the right kind of change is taking place, which is why I accepted the invitation in part as a way to better understand the reality of the country. The only way to understand Saudi Arabia and the Arab world in general is to see it from within.
Saudi Arabia is one of the most advanced countries in the region in the use and dissemination of social media, and the transformation that it is generating is appreciated at all levels. The newly appointed Minister of Information and Communication Technologies, Abdullah Alswaha, a former director of Cisco and an entrepreneur in the digital field who defines himself on his LinkedIn profile as: “on a mission to digitize a nation”, dedicated a video to my course, which focuses on the digital transformation for the country and the importance thereof.
It’s not every day one is mentioned by a minister :-) Undoubtedly, there is still much to be done and many changes still to come in Saudi Arabia, but the chance to see a country clearly aligned around a vision that includes digital transformation, which invites you to talk about the subject and virtually treats it as a matter of state, has been an extremely rewarding interesting experience.
(En español, aquí)
