I build organisations that can carry their own technology.
Technology Executive & Transformation Builder. Based in Jeddah, working across Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The questions that kept getting bigger
Will it stay up?
Cairo, 2008. A server room attached to sixty thousand square metres.
Is the organisation actually working?
Telecom operations, then running IT rather than administering it.
Who owns this decision?
A group-level transformation mandate across four sectors.
What does the decision cost?
Ten companies, and a payroll that is mine.
And what makes a decision good?
Four books in Arabic, written alongside the work.
The job titles changed because the question did. Not the other way round.
I started in 2008 as a systems administrator in a large retail and hospitality complex in Cairo — sixty thousand square metres of building with a server room attached to it. That is a useful place to begin, because nothing there is theoretical. When the network fails, several hundred people stop working, and you learn quickly that infrastructure is a promise made to people rather than a diagram.
From there the work moved outward rather than upward at first: telecom operations at Vodafone International Services, supporting server estates across operating companies in several time zones; then into Saudi Arabia, into real estate and development, where I began running IT rather than administering it.
The turn
From running systems to owning transformation
The change that mattered came when the questions stopped being about uptime and started being about how the business should work. At Jeddah Economic Company I led the first enterprise-wide ERP deployment in that organisation’s history, alongside the data centre, the security estate and a facility-management platform for a residential and commercial development. Later, at Aldyar Alarabiya, I held the group-level digital transformation and IT mandate across real estate, construction, healthcare and industrial subsidiaries.
Those two roles taught the same lesson from different angles. A transformation programme is mostly an argument — about sequencing, about who owns a decision, about what the organisation is willing to stop doing. The technology is the easy part, and treating it as the hard part is the most common way these programmes fail.
Building
Why I started building companies
In 2018 I co-founded Upward Technologies, and later Technify. The reason was not entrepreneurial. I had spent years watching implementations sold competently and delivered badly, and had concluded that the gap sat in the delivery organisation’s incentives rather than in its software. What followed was the same argument made repeatedly: each time a capability was doing badly because it was somebody’s second priority, it was given its own owner. There are ten companies now, across advisory, technology, capability and industry.
Running a company is a different education again. You learn what a decision costs when the payroll is yours: how partnerships actually work, why talented people leave, how a margin is really made, and how much of governance is simply the discipline of writing things down before they become disputes.
Writing
Why I write in Arabic
Building and writing turned out to be the same habit at two different lengths. Governance is the discipline of writing a decision down before it becomes a dispute; a book is that discipline carried well past the point any single project would need it. The books are in Arabic because the rooms where these decisions actually get made are Arabic rooms.
Alongside the work I write, and by now the writing has become a body of its own: four books of my own in Arabic — on how a decision is weighed, what uprightness costs in a market, how a surah reads as one argument about building a life, and what a company’s numbers say about it — and professional works on choosing, delivering and operating enterprise systems, with four industry references underneath them. It is all set out under the written work.
Now
What I am doing now
Most of my work inside the group is deciding what deserves to be somebody’s first priority rather than their second, and then making sure it has an owner who can be held to it. Outside it I take a small number of advisory engagements, on questions that are expensive to get wrong and difficult to answer from inside.
And I keep writing. It is the part of the work with no client and no deadline, which makes it the only place where the thinking has to stand up on its own.
Record
Recognition and credentials
Named among the Top 25 IT Consultants of the Year at the 2nd Information Technology Confex, Dubai, 16 October 2024, where I also spoke. Speaker at Construct Talks, Jeddah, September–October 2024.
PMP (Project Management Institute) · PECB ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Implementer · ISO 9001:2015 Lead Auditor · Lean Six Sigma Black Belt · Total Quality Management · BCS Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis. BSc Computer Science, Modern Academy, Cairo.
Egyptian. Based in Jeddah on a Premium Iqama. I work in Arabic and English, and I think in both.
If any of this bears on something you are working on, the contact page is the way through.