Aligned with the Vision 2030 of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, SDAIA is taking charge in building and promoting national capabilities in Data and Analytics, thereby creating social and economic impacts, grow local talent and build a Data Driven economy and society. This will help in broaden the use and adoption of Data in the Kingdom, fuel socio-economic growth and yield digital dividends.
Most of the government organizations have limited access to the much-needed, high quality cross government data assets and always struggle to discover and get hold of those trusted data assets to generate actionable insights.
To address pain points of government entities face, SDAIA has developed a national scale data ecosystem called as NDB which consists of data-centric platforms to achieve following goals:
• Contributing sizable non-oil revenue in the GDP of the Kingdom
• Instilling data as a common denominator for the digital economy
• Increasing national productivity, international competitiveness
• Steering ESG initiatives for sustainable development
• Realizing positive economic and financial benefits of national policies and decisions
In order to accelerate data literacy, empower self-service data discovery and accessibility, SADIA has developed an innovative and state of the art constellation of the platforms encircled by Data standards and policies for robust governance. Furthermore, phenomenal progress has been achieved and now these platforms have become the focal point of the data related activities (exchange, governance, experimentation etc.) across government entities and tangible impact and results of NDB platforms are as follows:
• National Data Lake: 40 Government agencies +2000 Datasets
• Open Data Portal: +6000 Datasets from 9 sectors
• National Data Marketplace: +200 APIs (more on the way)
• National Data Catalog: +130 large systems, +10 Agencies, + 200 KPI/Metrics, +1500 Business attributes, +1000 Glossaries
• National Reference Data Platform: +300 reference data tables

https://data.gov.sa/en/

• Saudi Arabia

• Youth
• Women
• The unemployed
• The poor
• Remote and rural communities
• (since Data cuts across all segments of government, NDB supports all the listed beneficiaries)

the end-to-end design of NDB project was based on open architecture principles and the design intent was that the part of the full-scale blueprint of NDB especially Data Lake can be leveraged for setting up the data lakes for various sectors (Health, Education, Tourism, Entertainment, Culture etc.) which is perfectly aligned with the KSA National Data Strategy to save cost, time, human effort, minimize the risk and accelerate the data sharing by the sectors through faster time to market. This replicability also benefits NDB as it streamlines the sectorial data acquisition and helps in amassing national data assets at much higher speed through the sectorial data lakes. Furthermore, NDB also aspires to act as an advisor, coach by sharing all the knowledge and learnings for countries intending to develop the same Data Bank to help them saving cost, achieving faster time to market and benefiting from governed and trusted national data assets for delivering better civic services and social uplifting to its people.

Successful initiatives tend to be purposeful. National Data Bank is fully sustainable from technical aspect as it is managed by inhouse team of IT experts of SDAIA. The open architecture principles adopted from the very beginning of the NDB journey is also helping by having minimal to no external dependency and vendors lock-in. From economic sustainability perspective, NDB has empowered a national data market place which has an integrated a comprehensive monetization framework for monetizing the National Data assets which offsets the CAPEX and OPEX of NDB and additionally contributes to the Kingdom’s GDP and increasing the non-oil revenues. The two-prong approach for achieving sustainability is very well aligned with the Vision 2030 of the KSA and national data strategy.

The NDB initiative helps in actively promoting shared responsibility, and respect for nature values of WSIS by unlocking the value of data by collecting from various government agencies which is needed to understand the impact of various economic and industrial functions on environment and sustainability. The data is made available to policy makers to have a full insight through data that how environmental concerns and aspirations for sustainable future can be woven into the policies and acts to ensure these are adopted as shared responsibility to give a better tomorrow for the generations to come. Without that data, all policies and actions are best guesses which highly likely result in being counter-productive and producing undesirable impacts.