Architecting the Saudi solar manufacturing : using Enterprise Architecture Framework

Abstract

The demand for Saudi oil is increasing locally and internationally, and being one of the major oil exporters in the world, the government of Saudi Arabia needs to balance between local consumption and international demand. To address this challenge, Saudi Arabia is adopting an aggressive strategy to use solar energy instead of oil to generate electricity. This strategy creates an opportunity to diversify the country's GDP by building solar manufacturing industry. This thesis uses the Enterprise Architecture Framework, developed by Nightingale and Rhodes, to propose the optimal architecture for the Saudi solar manufacturing in terms of organization, policy, strategy, product, services, infrastructure, and R&D. The first stage of the framework identifies the landscape and the major stakeholders in the solar manufacturing, and then studies the current situation of the Saudi solar manufacturing. The second stage analyzes the different proposed architectures. The third stage evaluates the different architectures, and the fourth stage selects and validates the winning architectures. The evaluation criteria for the different proposed architectures are based on three angles: "Attractiveness", which measures the level of compatibility between the architecture and the needs of the Saudi government. The "Effort", measures the human and financial effort required to deploy the architecture. The "Risk", which measures the different risks associated with the architecture. The winning architecture encourages Saudi businessmen to acquire international companies along with building local manufacturing for products in the lower end of the solar manufacturing value chain. The strategy in this architecture is to build fast capabilities in the technology and process side by acquiring international companies and steady capabilities in the production side by gradually moving up in the value chain. Also, the architecture proposes focusing and building the local R&D capabilities to improve the productivity, and profitability of the solar manufacturing companies.