Saudi Vision 2030: Sustainable Economic Development through IoT

Saudi Vision 2030 aims at reducing the kingdom’s dependency of oil through diversifying the economy and developing the service sectors such as tourism, recreation, health, education, communication, and infrastructure. Thus far, it is apparent that the plan aims at military manufacturing facilities. However, even though the vision does not specifically outline possible Information Technology (IT) related actions that will diversify the economy, we suggest in this paper IT sector developments that can be in line with the vision 2030 such as the development of Information Technology (IT) human workforce in addition to Information Technology Entrepreneur activities and manufacturing. In addition, new technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big data, and others can play an integral role in diversifying the economy through well thought out plans in these areas. This paper will present case studies of countries that have opted to promote Information Technology as a primary goal among its youth and have succeeded in securing a place in the IT ranking of countries that export technology. Saudi Arabia through its dependency on the oil sector all these years has not made the IT sector a prime target and not much attention was given towards gearing its education systems to IT-related fields. Saudi Youth choose the field of Engineering in hopes of landing jobs in the big oil and biochemical companies such as ARAMCO, SABIC, SADARA, and all its subcontractors. A large percentage of youth choose the business majors in hopes of jobs in the same companies as well as banking and business industries. Very few choose IT-related majors with the false perception that jobs are scarce or that they are low paying jobs. In this paper, we present the scenario in which IT becomes a major part of economic diversity in Saudi Arabia and present a theoretical framework towards achieving this task.