Through the years of working on multiple governmental processes, you would expect that governments in the region, specifically in Saudi Arabia, given the magnitude of investment made into its governmental process, can be seen as efficient.

But this, for multiple reasons, is not the case, and will not be the case in the foreseeable future.

Throughout this article, due to various NDA’s terms, i will be giving examples that will mimic real life, but will not be related to any specific client i worked with

1- Process Duplication

In a hierarchy of a dozen corelated departments, you will always find duplicate process flows, redundant approvals and a variety of steps where just communication activities are making a majority of efforts; resulting in unnecessary delays and more work effort

A person, for example, can submit a request for a construction permission at one local authority,

He / she will then need to submit the same request at another related regional one, practically with the same data, ending up doing the follow up twice at two different related locations.

How does that happen? Read the remaining points and we’ll figure it out together

2- RIP BPMN

Standards? Best practices? Notation language? Forget it, in this part of the world, very few even use a pen and paper, let alone putting together proper documentation for any mainstream process, and if you do it’s either written in gibrish, or it has nothing to do with the real life flow.

3- Visualization Extinct

Visualization is the presentation of data and processes in a pictorial or graphical format.

It enables process makers to see analytics presented visually, so they can grasp difficult concepts or identify new patterns.

In the Middle East there is an urgent need for systems that allow proper visualisation of the information and its business processes, in an understandable manner which assists members of the multi-disciplinary team to comprehend the overall knowledge of the multi-disciplinary process design issues.

Very rarely you find an A2 hanging on any department head wall describing his department process…

They just rely on written communication at best, resulting in a clear lack of updates or modernization of departmental processes, let alone updating the enterprise wide business processes.

Conclusion

Modernizing the government, and digitizing its services, require more than buying hardware and software licenses.

It requires a radical review of the processes underlying the multitude of systems put into action since several years. And comprehensively transforming the Government Process Inefficiencies

The main challenges facing Saudi Arabia in implementing its transformation program remains the ability to adapt its obsolete governmental business process into a modern, capable and effective framework of continuous optimization