Digital Transformation Key Enablers
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Electronic Identification (eID)
Chip-Enabled Identity Card (ID)
All citizens and residents in Saudi Arabia aged 15 and over must have a valid National Identity Card (ID). The ID card contains biometric and digital information such as an image of the face, fingerprints, and demographics. To enhance security and prevent identity theft, the ID card contains a bar code plus an optical stripe. It also offers a digital signature through a secure application enabled by the holder of an ID card.
ID cards are used to confirm the holder’s identity with government agencies and third-party service providers such as banks and telecom operators. In fact, ID cards can be used as a travel document to any of the GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates). In addition, it can be used securely to store and digitalize ID documents including your national ID, residency permit (iqama), driving license and holder’s vehicle registration (istimara) through the ‘Absher individuals’ application. The Digital ID is a valid proof of identity at various government institutions and third parties without the need to carry physical ID documents.
Electronic Identification (eID) for Online Services
All Saudi citizens or legal residents in Saudi Arabia can create their eID (or digital identity) by registering on the National Single Sign-On system or by creating their eID using the Nafath mobile application (available in Apple App Store, Android Google Play and Huawei AppGalery), both developed by the National Information Center. Both solutions are user-friendly, easy to use and fully integrated into the national Single Sign-On System. Holders of eID can use it to access more than 6000 government online services available on my.gov.sa, other government portals, and services provided by third parties such as banks, telecom operators, etc. Details are well defined on the National Information Center.
Electronic Signatures and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
National Information Center
The National Information Center is mandated to establish and operate the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) structure. The role of the Center is to provide an integrated system for managing the infrastructure of public keys on which all e-business is based, such as e-commerce and e-government. The system enables internet traders of all categories, including government, citizens, or businesses, to conduct various e-operations confidentially and consistently with complete safety.
Digital Certification Systems and Regulations
The Electronic Transactions Law and its implementing regulations establish the legal foundation to ensure that electronic signatures are treated equally to handwritten signatures. Here is a detailed summary of the key points:
- Legal Equality of Signatures: Electronic signatures that fulfil the requirements of the Electronic Transactions Law carry the same legal weight as traditional handwritten signatures.
- Validity and Enforceability of E-Contracts: The system permits the offering and acceptance of contracts through electronic transactions. A contract is deemed valid and enforceable once it is complete and meets the system's requirements.
- National Public Key Infrastructure (PKI): Saudi Arabia has established a National Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to ensure the trust and efficient transmission and exchange of information electronically. This PKI is set up under the Electronic Transactions Law to manage and regulate electronic transactions and e-signatures.
Interoperability and Shared Government Data Exchange
The Government Service Bus (GSB) represents one of the main pillars of the national infrastructure projects, operated and managed by the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA), aiming to activate the exchange of joint government data between authorized entities, using the data to provide their government services electronically in an accurate, fast and secure manner.
Due to the nature of government services and their nature of relying on integration and interdependence between various agencies to implement government services, there are two forms of channel links. The first one includes the link of the entity to the channel as a provider of services and data that are provided through the channel for the benefit of other parties, while the other form includes the link to the channel as a beneficiary of the services and data through the channel.
The Government Integration Channel (GSB) is one of the many forms of support and assistance provided by the National Data Center (NIC) to government agencies in order to provide their services electronically in an integrated, easy, and accessible manner, especially since the concept of e-government transactions requires all government agencies to provide their services while ensuring that the data and information required to complete the services are provided by other government agencies. This is carried out through the Government Service Bus (GSB Integration).
- Benefits of Linking to the Government Service Bus (GSB):
- Assisting government agencies to create integrated e-services.
- Providing consistent updated data.
- Enabling government agencies to complete and provide their services electronically.
- Providing services offered by a single government agency to all government sectors.
- Services provided through the channel are characterized by high-quality, efficient performance, reliability, and increased dependability.
- Reducing the time and cost required for integration and interdependence between government agencies.
- Reducing the development lifecycle of e-services.
There are an established set of regulations for governing the exchange of shared government data. Among them are the following:
National Data Bank
The National Data Bank (NDB) is a constellation of interconnected robust national data platforms that are established and operated by the Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA), aimed at accelerating data literacy and instilling data as a common denominator for the digital economy in the Kingdom. The NDB is composed of six platforms, two available for the general public (the Open Data Portal and the Data Lake) and four having government entities as a target audience (Data Marketplace, National Data Catalog, Reference Data Management and Data Labs)
Open Data Portal
The services offered by the Portal are as follows:
- Frictionless dataset publishing workflows for data providers.
- Well-defined dataset management and maintenance lifecycle.
- Supporting various formats such as APIs and delimited files.
- Community engagement features such as events, forums, and knowledge bases.
Data Lake
The persisted data is refined, enriched, and curated in the form of datasets to comply with the national data standards. The curated datasets are shared with the consumers in a secure and robust manner to bring agility to decision-making and make self-service analytics a reality.
The services offered by the Data Lake are as follows:
- Highly available, scalable, and flexible platform to serve multifaceted producers and consumers.
- Secure and large-scale data transmission through proprietary solutions.
- Full transparency through lineage, audits, and logging.
- Secure integration with the Data Marketplace.
As of 1 May 2024, 50 government agencies and 240 systems were integrated into the Data Lake.
Data Marketplace
- Consumer onboarding and management.
- APIs discovery and subscription.
- Innovative and scalable data-sharing interfaces.
- Flexible monetization models.
National Data Catalog
- Intuitive features for discovering the national data assets.
- 360-degree visibility of data assets.
- Data trust through lineage and provenance.
- Optimized governance, compliance, and quality.
Reference Data Management
The Reference Data Management (RDM) platform aims at standardizing, classifying, and defining the ownership of the reference data at a national level across government agencies. It fully supports extensive curation capabilities and ensures completeness, accuracy and consistency of the available reference data. The standardized reference data is then shared among government agencies to be used in their applications, which improves the overall data quality, accuracy and interoperability. The RDM connects different domains and applications across consistent values and semantics to create multi-domain views and hierarchies. It ensures permissible values management, asserts data authenticity, and maps siloed internal data against national data standards which helps in driving business logic and value.
The services offered by the platform are as follows:
- Central and collaborative reference data management.
- Built-in automated, tailored accuracy and quality controls.
- Highly flexible and customizable workflows for complex reference data.
- Reference data availability through the Data Marketplace.
Data Labs
The Data Labs product is an effort to create an interdisciplinary network at the government level in exploring what difference the data and insights make in developing, improving collective and individualized experience for public services, and attending to civic problems. The labs leverage the persisted data in the Data Lake through advanced functional and technical capabilities to uncover which questions end-users should ask, and then help them find the answer. It offers an opportunity to empower government agencies to obtain the most tangible value from the available data.
The labs help the agencies experiment with their ideas and run various data-related PoCs/PoVs before embarking on the journey for realizing the value from data and analytics. It supports every step of the data discovery and experimentation process and helps in collaborating, testing, and evaluating hypotheses for driving innovation.
The salient services offered by the Data Labs are as follows:
- Open and secure platform for data discovery, wrangling, munging, and mash-up.
- Self-service tools for reports and dashboards prototyping.
- Equipped with technologies related to augmented and advanced analytics.
- Collaborative workspace for co-ideation and co-creation.
Digital Software and Platforms
The Kingdom adopted and developed comprehensive government platforms, which launched several e-platforms and services aimed at promoting integration principles in providing services between government entities and providing streamlined and safe experiences for all beneficiaries. This was emphasized by supporting and operating the Government Service Bus (GSB) and the Chief Information Officers Portal, which generated the launch of remote work campaigns for 229 government agencies, completed 249 services for government agencies through the portal while currently providing 165 services, and adopting a unified smart attendance system.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology launched a specialized, non-profit initiative to spread digital awareness among society. The initiative offers many specialized digital transformation and information security courses, and experts and specialists teach numerous seminars. It also provides an opportunity to obtain answers from specialists.
The Kingdom launched the Digital Giving Initiative, Attaa Digital, which was awarded the 2020 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prize, by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), in the category of cultural and linguistic diversity and local content. This contributed to launching the “Ethra” platform in partnership with the private sector and the launch of the “Kollona Attaa” initiative.
The main Saudi electronic magazine specialized in the government sector provides visitors, interested parties, and digital transformation leaders with specialized content and data regarding artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and emerging technologies locally and globally.
- Masder
The Kingdom supported open-source solutions by launching the Masdar platform, a integrated platform for Saudi government entities, public and private companies, universities and research institutions focused on open-source software, which contributed to reducing costs, encouraging digital innovation, maximizing local content, and establishing the giving and sharing concept to build an effective digital society in the Kingdom.
- “ThinkTech”
The Kingdom launched the Digital Knowledge Platform, “ThinkTech”, which is a platform that includes awareness projects for exploring new technological developments aimed at raising digital awareness. It contributed to serving over 3 million digital content beneficiaries and 100,000 event beneficiaries, launching “Future Trucks” and “Virtual Lab” initiatives to raise awareness about Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, with 31,800 beneficiaries, organizing and holding the World Robot Olympiad for the first time in the Kingdom, where more than 800 Saudi teams and over 2,000 students were trained on Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, launching the “Educational Journeys” platform for exploring new technological developments to achieve sustainable development, and launching the “IBM Digital-Nation” platforming partnership with IBM company to provide a wide range of courses at different levels in emerging technologies.
- “Tech Champions”
The Kingdom launched the “Tech Champions” program, which has achieved many projects such as 4 camps, 3 business accelerators, 3,000 incubators, 350 participants in bootcamps, 60 beneficiaries of accelerators, 50 new digital business models, and 20 incubated entrepreneurs in its first version. The program contributes to supporting entrepreneurs and motivating new companies to enter the market with entrepreneurs and individuals interested in this field.
- “Digital Hemam Bookcamps”
The Kingdom launched the “Digital Himam Bookcamps”by the Saudi Digital Academy to professionalize and qualify recent graduates and job seekers through intensive, qualitative and specialized training camps, including the Software Quality Assurance Bootcamp, which is a 13 week intensive remote training camp.
- Alibaba Cloud Center
The Kingdom launched Alibaba Cloud Center for cloud computing in Riyadh, which contributed to achieving digital sustainability, developing and training local talents, accelerating the growth of the local economic ecosystem, raising the rates of Saudization of technological jobs and building a strong national economy over the next five years.
The Kingdom launched the largest advanced cloud center in the Kingdom as part of the strategic agreement signed by Saudi Aramco Co, and Google Cloud. The partnership supports entrepreneurs and companies by reducing efforts by 70%, reducing costs by 30% and providing innovative solutions in the 4th industrial revolution, data, and artificial intelligence.
Wazen Methodology
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology launched the Wazen Methodology, with methodologies and tools to calculate costs of government services. This contributed to numerous achievements in 2020, including the development of a methodology for calculating and reducing the cost of digital services, based on global best practices by Technology Business Management (TBM) Council, designed a tool for calculating and optimizing costs, in addition to preparing training materials and changing management plans, designed a performance measurement dashboard to enable decision makers to develop and improve the cost of performance of digital government services, developed a detail plan using the aforementioned methodology for calculating and reducing the cost of digital government services 2020/2021, and trained executives in 18 government entities.
Digital-by-Default and Once-Only Principle
One of the most crucial principles in the digital transformation that have been taken into account in the NDGS and the Digital Government Regulatory Framework is the digital-by-default principle. The Saudi government taking the lead in trying to develop a digital model and trend for citizen experiences, as that helps to make the service delivery to them much easier and faster. This is a type example of “digital-by-default” approach. It endeavors to set digital platforms as the primary communication channel with citizens by 2024. An innovative feature of the Kingdom’s e-government strategy is the “once-only” policy, whereby data is not collected several times by separate agencies, reducing redundancies and enabling a more integrated experience accessing various public services. This strategy is efficient for digital economy as well, and being adopted. Through these efforts, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) awarded the Kingdom the Government Leadership Award in 2020, recognizing the country’s efforts in developing policies and regulations that support the digital economy, stimulate investment and creativity, and contribute to sustainable development goals. The ITU also took note of the Kingdom’s application of international best practices in transparency, the inclusion of public views and organizational independence in the ICT sector. Another major priority for the Kingdom is upgrading national talent to meet future job requirements. Accordingly, significant investments have been made to promote knowledge and increase the capacity of the national talent pool in science, technology, engineering and mathematics through supportive programs and policies. But classroom teaching is not enough to meet the digital economy’s demands. Here again, local universities can tap into the expertise and capabilities of technology companies to prepare students for the future.
ePayment Channels
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia provides various systems for making government payments, thereby linking the government with its various sectors, and with the individuals. This in turn is designed to facilitate the process of making government payments, while elevating them to the global standards of payment and data security. The Ministry of Finance and the Saudi Arabia Monetary Agency (SAMA) are considered the two most relevant entities when it comes to monetary payment processes.
Payments methods differ to meet the individuals and entities’ various needs. These are:
- Electronic Payment: which is done through online banking services (Government Payments, Sadad)
- Phone call: through banking services – phone banking.
- ATMs
- At the Bank
Government initiatives
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has facilitated financial services by confirming a number of electronic methods including:
- Sadad: an online system that operates by providing services for making payments and taxes for individuals, businesses and the public sector, and enables individuals to pay their electricity, water, telecommunications, and government fees.
- Saree’: Known as the Saudi Fast Transfer System which enables the user to make remittances automatically and ensures access to the beneficiary immediately in order to reduce financial risks and dispense with carrying money to transfer from one bank to another.
- Mada: a system that enables ATM, POS and online payment services to perform the online tasks easily and simply.
Electronic Payment Applications
- STC Pay: a digital wallet equipped with all the means and options that enable individuals to control their payments in all, where they can transfer, receive, shop and control their financial matters through a single mobile application.
- Bayan Portfolio: an innovative and simplified way to enable individuals and businesses to accept, and spend electronic payments.
- Mada Pay: an application allows bank customers, who have issued cards, to save all their bank cards (whether related to the current or credit account) in one application on the smart phone and pay through it.
- Apple Pay: a feature available on iPhones or Apple Watch that enables the user to pay directly with no need to use a credit card.
For more information about the ePayment methods available in the Kingdom, please visit the following link.
AI-powered Chatbots and Human Support
All government agencies in Saudi Arabia use AI-powered live chatbots on their government websites, service portals and their call centres.
Users can quickly and in real-time get answers to their questions by using these chatbots. Chatbots provide 24/7 conversational AI communication to users, providing them with information about regulations, policies, laws, services, procedures, etc. These AI-powered chatbots use machine learning to improve their interactions with users continuously.
However, if the users are unsatisfied with the answer or have a complex problem, they may choose to talk to an agent from the call or customer centre. Both the chatbots and human support are available 24/7 across all government agencies. For the opening hours and location of physical customer centres please consult the contact us section of the government agency in question or find them in the government directory.
For more information about government agencies and the use of AI-powered chatbots, please visit the government directory containing a list of all agencies in Saudi Arabia, they contact points and opening hours or the Beneficiaries Engagement Center (Amer).
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