Questions/Answers

Estishraf Program is the analytical arm to the National Information Center. It enables decision makers and government officials to unlock the powers of data science to drive factual decision making. The program employs an elite multidisciplinary team to apply advanced analytics and artificial intelligence technology to the centralized big data in the Data Bank to produce valuable business insights and to tell domain stories. It supports government entities in obtaining advice and recommendations that support informed decision-making. It utilizes data analytics tools and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to make diversified insights to assist leaders and government entities in obtaining advice and recommendations that support informed decision-making. Throughout its three years of operations, Estishraf implemented over 85 analytics projects which were implemented across more than 25 government entities helping decision-makers in formulating economic, political and social policies, and contributed to finding opportunities to achieve potential savings and nonoil revenues for the state treasury by more than SR 80 billion.

Estishraf has many attributes showcasing innovation to deliver inclusive services through digital transformation. It utilizes data analytics tools and AI technologies to develop insights to support data-driven decision-making, in a more affordable, secure, and better representative of reality. It leverages the cross-sectoral data in the Data Bank to help government entities share the same pool of data to create a 360 view on topics which promotes reusability of resources empowering government entities to cooperate to reach their goals. Estishraf may not be directly used by the general public, but it directly increases quality of public services through empowering data-driven decisions.

Estishraf targets SDG 1, and is aligned with target 1.B. It ran many policy change simulations that test changes in social security subsidies, policies and eligibility requirements, policies regarding collection of overdue traffic violations and the impact of different policies on low-income households to minimize the impact on the livelihood of the citizens and optimize it to list citizens above the poverty line. Estishraf targets SDG 8, and is aligned with targets 8.2 and 8.9. It analyzed employment trends to reduce unemployment rates and increase market-fit of public university programs. It achieved that by simulating scenarios of growth in employment as well as creating performance indicators to measure sector growth specifically in Travel and Tourism and how efficient it could be in relevance with initiatives and development of new companies. Estishraf targets SDG 11, and is aligned with targets 11.1 and 11.2. It worked with the Ministry of Housing to improve housing affordability programs for citizens and define eligibility criteria as well as housing preferences. Estishraf also conducted many projects around studying road safety, it also simulated potential metro utilization for work commute and identified infection hubs that could potentially transmit Covid-19 virus.

Socially: It provided entities with clearer insights to improve services: education, social development, population dynamics, real estate, Hajj and Umrah and measuring socioeconomic impact of policy reforms. Economically: It supported entities in identifying and applying reforms to certain policies to increase efficiency of budget allocation, price negotiation and vendor selection in medical/vehicle insurances, employment, data circuits and identified potential tourism opportunities to further strengthen the Kingdom’s economic stance. Environmentally: It promotes reusability of resources, and optimization of utility. Estishraf is built on the concept of centralization of shared service, which reduces redundancy in spending and consumption.

Traditionally public entities depended on shortsighted statistics, expert guesses and best practices to set policies, strategies, or to measure KPIs. The entities may opt for loose benchmarking to design a set of inclusive policies, which may affect an amalgam of segments in the community in comparison to others, such as unjustly distributed subsidies in social security, housing support or lending services. Estishraf has empowered government entities to be able to make informed decisions based on data, test impact of policy, simulate change, measure KPIs and make predictions. This service has allowed decision makers to save time, effort and capture hidden opportunities.

Internally, Estishraf’s team of 83 is 40% women, and of the core analytics functions, they make up 52%, which showcases the support of women in STEM. In its operations, Estishraf focuses its attention to promote equality as well as inclusiveness by highlighting its downfall in any project it conducts. It looked at reasons that hinder female employment specifically from a social perspective to provide decision makers with a clearer view of the problem and address it accordingly. Furthermore, Estishraf analyzed the impact COVID19 had on employment, it identified segments in the labor force where women were likely to be affected.

Estishraf was initially developed as part of The Kingdom’s reforms to achieve its Vision 2030 goals. The strategy for the National Information Center was reformed to transform the entity from a national data center into a bigger establishment with an active mandate to support all government entities with insights exploiting and utilizing the volume of administrative data it hosts. This unique advantage allowed Estishraf to empower decision makers with a fusion of insights beyond the data of their respective entity alone by leveraging data from other domains to develop a 360 approach on any problem.

In the year Estishraf was founded, 3 projects were developed which achieved about $600 million potential savings in government spending. In 2019, the team grew about 8 times and successfully conducted 13 projects achieving $9.8 billion in potential government savings. In 2020, the team grew to 73 members across 5 specialized teams offering full stack of data analytics and decision support services, producing 25 projects by Q3 and $12.65 billion in potential savings. It is established on two vital assets: The National Data Bank that hosts most of the government’s administrative data, and a team of highly capable individuals who specialize in data analytics, machine learning, software development and data engineering. When it first started in 2018, Estishraf was offering services that were foreign to government officials. The concept of using data analytics in decision support wasn’t well-defined or clear. Hence, the Estishraf team worked with government entities in an effort to scope out scenarios of existing problems that the public entities were facing and how the program can use data to solve these complications. Post this successful start, a data-driven culture started to be defined, and demand on the service significantly grew.

A main issue which lies at the center of all Estishraf operations is the mitigation of concerns around data privacy. All the data available under the program is anonymous and masked, so Estishraf can't identify specific individuals from the given data which ensures data privacy of the individuals. This approach empowers different government entities to make fully informed decisions while respecting the privacy of the citizens and residents.

Estishraf enhanced the way that government entities approach new problems by offering in-house solution for novel problems which costs less than hiring consulting firms as it is data-driven, and comprehensive by offering a 360 view on any topic. It contributed to empowering the economy of the Kingdom through multiple scenario analysis. One approach is predicting export opportunities of local content and respective strategic partners using Artificial Intelligence with numerous inputs such as the Kingdom’s competitive advantage and predicted demand. Other approaches include diversifying import countries to reduce singular dependencies especially in products of national security levels of importance.

Not applicable.

Estishraf Platform utilizes data and AI to create diversified insights responding to top priorities of decision makers in the Kingdom. The program employs cutting edge machine learning technology in creating predictive models that answer to the need of the decision maker. It relies heavily on emerging technologies by using big data technology to store, manage, access and manipulate the massive amount of available data in the platform. It also uses different machine learning technologies to forecast and understand future or trend patterns.

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Estishraf Platform utilizes data and AI to create diversified insights responding to top priorities of decision makers in the Kingdom. The concept can be adopted by countries with similar digital infrastructure to unlock the power of data science to drive factual decision making for government officials which contributes to optimize spending and achieve savings.

Estishraf’s role is to identify the correct datasets from the vast pool of data available to generate insights. While Estishraf is a proof of concept for using advanced data analytics to help answer real life questions. Doing so, it uses state of the art big data technologies, highly capable technical experts in AI, and data engineering and software development. It brings the power of advanced analytics and AI to extract deep insights.

Estishraf’s main asset, the national data bank, and human talent are valuable in the context outside of providing government officials with decision support. Under the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 goals is the privatization of public services, and Estishraf already sees the potential in creating certain data driven products that will allow the initiative to be financially independent and generate its own return on investments while supporting with solving problems in both the private and public sectors.

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Estishraf had its strategic themes evaluated by the Strategy Management Office (SMO) and by SDAIA’s customer management team. The SMO measured certain KPIs against three of the four strategic themes identified in its strategy: insights and analytics, business sustainability, and operational excellence. The fourth strategic theme is customer centric cervices which was evaluated by the customer management team where it ran a survey across 20 out of 23 beneficiaries of the service for the period of September to October 2020. The evaluation was carried out by using the telephone survey methodology for the Center's clients and evaluating their satisfaction.

For the internal Strategic Management Office (SMO) evaluation, a set of predefined KPIs were tracked across the years of operations since 2018. For the external customer satisfaction evaluation, the 5 point Likert scale was used to measure the satisfaction across three main dimensions: customer satisfaction on the service and whether it fulfills their needs, customer relationship with the platform and the available communication methods, and procedures for the provided services and their relevant technical support.

The SMO’s evaluation highlighted a noticeable growth in Estishraf’s capabilities and value of output, and its coherence to realizing the strategy and achieving its vision. The survey completion rate was 87%. The average satisfaction rate for the data analytics service was 4.49/5 for the 20 entities that completed the survey. In addition, 11 out of the 20 entities has rated the service above the average satisfaction rate. The evaluation recommended special attention to be paid towards the three entities that ranked the lowest to increase customer satisfaction and overall benefit of the service.

The Saudi Data and AI Authority has three arms; a regulatory arm (the National Data Management Office), an innovation and R&D arm (the National Center for AI), and an operational arm, which is the NIC. NIC operates on four pillars; Estishraf, The National Data Bank, Government Cloud (centralization of government technology infrastructure), and the last pillar which looks after the development of national platforms. Estishraf works closely with the databank as it hosts most of the live data that it analyzes. It also works closely with the other pillars of NIC and arms of SDAIA to complete the ecosystem through regulatory and development support.

Estishraf works closely with other government entities to achieve optimal results. The National Data Management Office with its distributed offices across every entity works with Estishraf to better understand data quality issues and opportunities for improvement in matters of standardization and regulation. Estishraf also helps in identifying priorities in connecting the Data Bank to more data sets that could unlock the most potential. Outside the SDAIA ecosystem, Estishraf works with different committees to better drive policy and measure KPIs using data.

The biggest asset Estishraf relies on is the Data Bank, which pulls information from different government entities. The lack of standardization and strict data policies have created discrepancies between the different data sources, which leads to inconsistent results, and limitations to fusing data. One of the arms of the Saudi Data and AI Authority is the National Data Management Office which looks into creating standards and policies around data creation and storage as well as format and naming so that any products or analytics built on top is trustable and standardized.