Investigating the Strategic Approach to Cyberspace Culture and its Alignment with Vision 2030: The Case of Qatar Higher Education

Abstract

The increased reliance on technology and the Internet represents a predominant feature of the modern business environment, whereby more enterprises are shifting their operations to online platforms in order to reduce operational costs, reach wider audiences, and leverage cyberspace technologies to achieve their strategic objectives. Likewise, in the higher education sector, universities and other higher education institutions are also adopting cyberspace technologies so as to achieve targeted strategic objectives. However, with the adoption of cyberspace, other unprecedented consequences emerge, such as cybercrime, cyber threats, cyber bullying, and cyber terrorism. Additionally, where the actions of actors in cyberspace are not well guided, this further results in the inefficient use of cyberspace technologies and their consequent misalignment with targeted strategic objectives. Subsequently, cyberspace culture emerges as a pivotal component for enabling the efficient use of cyberspace to achieve strategic objectives. The goal of the current research is to investigate the strategic approach to cyberspace culture and its alignment with Qatar’s higher education vision for 2030. A key motivation for undertaking this research concerned the implementation of the Qatar National Vision, 2030 (QNV 2030), which seeks to transform the country’s economy from hydrocarbon-based to knowledge-based by investing in science and technology and enhancing the higher education sector. As such, increased uptake and usage of technology is anticipated in the near future as the QNV 2030 is achieved. However, without proper guidance regarding the use of cyberspace technologies, the physical infrastructure is likely to deter achieving the higher education vision for 2030. In the research, data were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with 18 senior executives and by moderating a focus group comprising six managerial executives. The participants were drawn from Qatari regulatory organisations, higher education institutions, and the Ministry of Transport and Communication (MOTC). The findings indicated that, in order to align cyberspace culture with strategic objectives, effective frameworks are needed. However, current cyberspace culture frameworks were ineffective in aligning cyberspace culture to strategic objectives due to their failure to incorporate the impact of human factors. As a result, this research proposed a cyberspace culture framework to align strategic objectives in higher education. The framework comprised external elements (government’s strategic directive on Vision 2030), internal elements (higher education management and leadership), and culture (human factors). The proposed framework was validated by the focus group discussion and findings from previous literature, thereby indicating that it could be employed to align cyberspace culture with strategic objectives in different economic sectors aside from higher education. Nevertheless, the research further acknowledges that, in future scholarly work, there is a need for researchers to employ the model in a real-world setup so as to evaluate its effectiveness in aligning cyberspace culture with strategic objectives.