Esam Abdullah Khalaf Alwagait, Director, National Information Center (NIC) • Interview

NIC is one of the largest IT centers in the Middle East and viewed the pandemic as a key test of Saudi Arabia’s digital readiness.

Could you summarize the key responsibilities of NIC and the reasons behind its creation?

The NIC was established in 1979 with the task of implementing an information system project for the Ministry of Interior. The center provided IT solutions and services to the ministry and other government agencies, making it one of the largest IT centers in the Middle East. With the establishment of the vision 2030, a need to join the technology race emerged, the strategy by which NIC operates was updated, and, in 2019, a royal decree was issued to create the Saudi Data and AI Authority, which the center is now part of. The authority has three arms; a regulatory arm (the National Data Management Office), an innovation and R&D arm (the National Center for AI), and an operational arm, which is the NIC. As per the new strategy, NIC operates over four pillars. The first pillar is the centralization of all government data through The National Data Bank. This strategic direction will increase cost and effort efficiency, and empower intra-government supervision and collaboration. Another byproduct of The National Data Bank is the ability to use data and AI in decision support through the second pillar, “Estishraf” (Arabic for foresight). Through Estishraf we have served over 20 government entities through economic and strategic decision support that has resulted in over SAR40 billion of potential government savings. The third pillar is the centralization of government technology infrastructure through the Government Cloud (G Cloud), the goal of which is to allow government entities to shift their focus toward providing their core services without the overhead of building and maintaining technology infrastructure. The fourth pillar serves the need of developing high-quality national platforms. NIC developed and currently operates multiple renowned national platforms such as Absher, Tawakkalna, and Burooq, the video conferencing service used during the COVID-19 crisis. We are currently developing new platforms that will further progress the Kingdom in its quest for digitalization.

How does your mandate align with the ecosystem of regulators within the Kingdom, and how do you coordinate?

NIC is an operational entity and our main goal is to host data and services, in collaboration with the different regulators in the sector. We are working closely with Yesser in matters of standardization and enabling services between government entities and with SDAIA’s National Data Management Office in matters of data standardization and usage policies. So, we are always ensuring the highest level of harmony with other entities and compliance to regulation. However, it is worth mentioning the government is moving toward splitting the responsibilities between the regulator and the implementer, for example the Government Secure Network used to be operated by Yesser, but it has moved to NIC to honor this separation of concerns.

How does the pandemic change your position within the Saudi drive to digitalize the government?

I look at the pandemic as a test of the extent and quality of digitalization in our Kingdom. The pandemic has put the entire world on lockdown, hindering economies and raising serious concerns in critical sectors such as health, education, and trade. The government needed to react quickly to different issues. In healthcare, predictive analytics were necessary to estimate the extent of the pandemic and the necessary infrastructure needed to contain it. In trade and food security, accurate consumption data was necessary to study inventory levels and install necessary contingency plans. The government also needed to plan for the safe return of thousands of its citizens abroad after the borders shut down. These critical cases required vast and accurate data and advanced analytical abilities to produce actionable insights. Furthermore, technical issues of large scale emerged. The Ministry of Interior needed to manage curfew for 30 million individuals and the Ministry of Education had to find other means of delivering classes to 5 million students. Such problems may seem trivial but amount to tens of technical issues that require reliable infrastructure, trustable data, and capable talent to develop. Building Tawakkalna, the curfew management app, required cross-system data fusions to validate and integrate medical permits, work permits, and other types of permits. The exercise shed the light on critical digital issues across government systems; lack of standardization of data, legacy systems co-existing with newer versions, and the need of digitization of many paper-based transactions. Under the pandemic, strict social distancing measures were put in place, and virtual solutions had to be sought. At NIC we developed Burooq, a video-conferencing service at a critical level of security and reliability that fit its purpose and users, shedding light on yet another important pillar of digitalization touched on by the pandemic, and paving the way for a fully functional virtual government.