In a country with 185% mobile device penetration and some of the highest levels of Web usage in the world, how do Saudi officials deliver on the promise of eGovernment?
Dr. Mohammed Mustafa Mahmoud, CEO of the Madinah Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (MILE), says it’s not an easy task, given the high expectations of this Web-savvy audience. “Governments are faced with new demands and a fast growing array of new technologies and tools,” he says. “Beyond the traditional pendulum swings of big versus small government (the public sector being called to rescue when the economy suffers, and being urged to ‘get out of the way’ when conditions improve), we see in all parts of the world an unprecedented wave of new ideas about what governments could and should do, and how.”
At front center, from left: Dr. Mohamed Moustafa Mahmoud, Executive Director, MILE; H.E. Prince Tan Sri Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Former Finance Minister of Malaysia; HRH Prince Faisal Bin Salman, Governor Madinah Province – MILE “Meet The Leaders” conference, Madinah, January 30, 2014
With that in mind, last month Dr. Mahmoud convened a high-level group of government and business representatives from the MENA region and elsewhere in the Muslim world at the annual High Performance Governments – Meet The Leaders gathering in Madinah. Attendees included former Finance Minister of Malaysia Prince Tan Sri Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Costa Rican Ambassador to Japan Alvaro Cedeno Molinari, Pakistan’s Minister of Planning and Development Professor Ahsan Iqbal, Chief of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Vincenzo Aquaro, and Dr. Yasar Jarrar, Public Consulting Partner for Bain and Co., Dubai.
Engineer Ali Bin Saleh Al-Soma, Director General of Saudi Arabia’s Yesser eGovernment Program, said that the current second half of the 10-year Saudi plan to improve the public sector’s productivity and efficiency centers on the following key objectives:
– eParticipation: social media engagement with citizens
– Increased mobile access to governmental services
– Usage of big data in decision-making
– Increasing transparency and citizen’s trust
“This will result in the increased utilization of eServices, with increased comfort for people using these services,” says Al-Soma. “We are leveraging mobile and social media channels to increase contact with consumers of government services and facilitate their participation in co-creation of services. The ultimate goal is highly personalized and citizen-friendly service delivery.”
But the High Performance Governments program is just one facet of the MILE mission.
HRH Prince Faisal Bin Salman, Governor of the Medina province, speaks at MILE.
A MILE Ahead
Dr. Mahmoud (a.k.a. “3M” to his many friends and business contacts) weaves a bracing mix of past and future and business insight into every ten-minute presentation. As he addresses groups like the High Performance Governments gathering last month, he discusses not only the roots of Islam in the 7th century A.D., but also a vision for leadership and economic growth in the Arab and Muslim world over the coming decades.
His vision is expansive, full of optimism for growth and wealth creation across a huge swath of The Gulf region, North Africa, and Asia. But 3M, with his Ph. D from Wharton and stints in business and academia in North America and the Middle East, believes that businesses and governments from Indonesia to Morocco must address what he calls a “leadership deficit” before that vision can become reality.
“Many of our initiatives have been constrained by a lack of available business leaders who can take our new ideas and implement them on the ground,” he says.
3M cites a Financial Times survey of the world’s top 100 business schools that lists more than half in the U.S., a handful in Europe, a few others scattered elsewhere across the globe – and precisely zero in Arab and Muslim countries. Same story with mid-career executive education programs. There are also few corporate universities like those at Proctor and Gamble or Nestle’ in the West. And the companies in the region that do provide some kind of in-house training tend to offer it at the beginning or mid-level – there’s very little for senior executives. So the corporations send their executives overseas to the top business schools, which sometimes feature case studies with little relevance to the needs of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Add to that the jet lag, the occasional visa problems, the networking and business contacts that don’t amount to much when the students return home, and even the allure of the top Western schools begins to fade.
Dr. Mohamed Moustafa Mahmound, Executive Director of MILE, with HPG3 program participant Abdulrahman Alsmail, Quality Director, TVTC – Madinah, January 26, 2014
So with advice from McKinsey and Co., 3M and his backers at the Jeddah-based Knowledge Economic City, the Savola Group (a $4 billion Saudi conglomerate operating in 18 countries) and the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority launched MILE four years ago. Every day over the course of each two-week program, a different marquee-name b-school professor delivers an eight-hour program to a group of 30+ senior executives from the Middle East and Asia. Dr. Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School led an overview of “Strategies for Profitable Growth.” Professor Philip Moscoso from the IESE Business School in Madrid shared best practices for “Operational Excellence.” Dr. Basil Mustapha of Oxford led the group through an overview of “Competencies of Stars.” Dr. Kamel Jedidi from Columbia Business School taught “Strategic Marketing Management.” The content rivals that of any top-tier Executive Education program around the globe.
“I was really surprised, because I’ve done this kind of leadership program many times in the U.S. and the U.K. and France, with large organizations like GE,” said Anass Patel, CEO of the Paris-based Islamic finance company 570easi. “The mix of skills and cultures was really impactful. The participants bring not only their rich culture, but also very advanced technical skills.”
Alrasheed Abdullah Alkibsy, Director Business Development at Saudi Naghi Group (distributor for BMW & Range Rover in the Middle East) said “It’s a journey. From the first day, I was really impressed by the reasoning behind MILE – the ‘regionality,’ the relevance of the case studies.”
And this from Ali M. Sheneamer, Deputy Governor & COO at Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority: “I’m impressed by the richness of the content and the relevance of the content to what we do. This will lead to improvements in the service we offer to investors and internally, how we become a more efficient organization.”
Center left: H.E. Prince Tan Sri Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Former Finance Minister of Malaysia. Center right: HRH Prince Faisal Bin Salman, Governor of Madinah Province,– MILE “Meet The Leaders” conference, Madinah, January 30, 2014 (interior shot)
But MILE itself is just the beginning. Surrounding the MILE headquarters on the outskirts of Madinah sits a 50 square kilometer construction site that will one day become the Madinah Knowledge Economic City. At the moment it looks like a dusty patch of not very much, but by the time the Cisco-wired smart city project is completed in the next decade, no fewer than 150,000 people will live and work here in a massive green mixed-use development complete with a high-speed rail link to the holy city of Mecca 210 miles to the south.
And therein lies the business and cultural core of the idea. Madinah, where the Prophet Muhammad spent the last years of his life, is an almost obligatory destination for every Muslim. 3M noticed that after these pilgrims – many of them well-educated business owners and executives – finished their prayers and tours of The Prophet’s Mosque, they didn’t have much to do. So why not gather them together for networking and business education? Not only that, why not convince them to move their families and businesses to one of the most important and beloved sites in Islam? The leadership of the Madinah Knowledge Economic City is well on the way to achieving that right now, having signed commitments from numerous companies from Saudi and elsewhere in the region to establish offices, homes and administrative and manufacturing facilities on the site.
And the appeal reaches far beyond the Muslim and Arab worlds. On my last day at MILE last month, as I sipped cardamom-scented Saudi coffee and nibbled on Madinah dates with a Saudi business contact, I was struck by the simultaneous familiarity and exoticness of the scene. In his traditional white kafiyeh and thobe, my friend spoke of exactly the same goals, hopes and anxieties that I regularly express myself, and that I hear every day from executives from D.C. to Dallas. How can I make more time for my family? How do I grow my business? I realized that we had a lot more in common than I thought, and that there are ample opportunities for mutual benefit.
