When the mission is to transform a country

Pablo Martín de Holan, a long-time friend and currently Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the Prince Mohammad Bin Salman College of Business & Entrepreneurship (MBSC), where I recently spent a few days developing a course entitled “Leading Digital Transformation” (pdf), wrote me a short text about what digital transformation entails for a country like Saudi Arabia, where, as I wrote after my stay there, the question is practically a matter of state.

Pablo is one of the best and most complete academics I know in the area of entrepreneurship. He joined MBSC when it was set up about a year ago, and is among those responsible for positioning it as a modern institution capable of influencing the thinking of the country’s leadership cadre made up of a generation largely educated abroad and with internet access, that is preparing for the transition to a modern, diversified economy, away from oil within the government’s Vision 2030 plan. Pablo gave me a lot of useful advice that I have used on my course. Here’s his letter in its entirety:

“Everything that can be digitalized will be”

I first had the privilege of working with Enrique Dans in 2004 at IE business school. We were then in Shanghai teaching the Global Executive MBA and our professional relationship was deepening as we discovered a mutual passion for information technology and the same desire to understand how we can transform the way we work and live.

It was then that Enrique, in a small xiaolongbao restaurant (delicious Chinese dishes that served as inspiration for our ravioli), almost without thinking, said: "everything that can be digitalized will be", an idea I have since repeated many times, and that years later would come to illustrate the digital transformation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a wealthy but not fully developed G20 country that is actively trying to move from an essentially extractive and natural resource dependent economy to one based on knowledge and ideas.

A central aspect of this transformation process is about setting aside low-cost competing economic sectors to promote high productivity and added value, a priority objective for the Kingdom and for the well-being of its inhabitants.

The digital transformation of the government and the state is central to this process of change and is based primarily on incorporating the latest information technologies and encouraging companies to do so, helped by a generation of young people who have grown up with digital technologies able to think of new ways to create economic and social value through innovations based not just on IT, but also on new business models.

As is often the case with good ideas and good strategies, implementation is difficult. Despite the many successes of recent years whereby many ministries and government agencies have digitalized almost all of their processes, allowing for interaction with government via the internet, much remains to be done in Saudi Arabia, in the region, and in the rest of the world.

In particular, many people still need to be convinced that digitizing a process or a company is doing the same thing but with a machine, and that a government inspired by the ideas of the 21st century is not a good idea, if it has to work with the tools and concerns of the nineteenth century. Digitizing a sovereign nation is a radical change that requires transforming how things are done, and also what is done. This is neither novel nor limited to IT, but the magnitude of the change required for digitalization has few precedents in the history of humanity.

The government of Saudi Arabia has begun a transition with few precedents in history for its ambition and scale, and in that context, Enrique’s work is, once again, indispensable to understand the changes of mentality necessary for IT to bear fruit. One of the great advantages of the use of IT in government is the ability to move from a situation where the government is reactive to another in which information processing is used to avoid problems and implement solutions before problems generate critical situations.

In short, a few words spoken one winter afternoon in Shanghai 15 years ago have come to illustrate the aims and challenges of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, meaning it is only natural that the person who spoke them should now be helping the entrepreneurs of the Kingdom and the rest of the world to understand how to help everything that can be digitalized to be digitalized.

(En espa?ol, aquí)