How to prepare for Qiyas and reach the innovation stage

Qiyas, the Digital Government Authority's digital transformation measurement, assesses how far Saudi government entities comply with digital transformation standards and places each one on a five-stage ladder whose top stage is about creativity and innovation. You do not reach that stage by assembling files in the final weeks. You reach it by doing real innovation work in services and operations and recording it as it happens. This guide sets out what is confirmed about the measurement and a step-by-step way to prepare.

Before you start: the measurement's standards and methodology are updated from cycle to cycle. This article does not replace the methodology document the Authority publishes for each cycle, and it does not reproduce any of it. Go to the measurement page on the Digital Government Authority's website before you plan.

What is confirmed about Qiyas

We have kept to what we could verify in published sources:

• Issuer and purpose. The Digital Government Authority issues the Digital Transformation Measurement Index, described by participating entities as the main tool for measuring government entities' performance and capabilities in digital government (Saudipedia; Islamic University of Madinah).
• Five stages. Establishment (sometimes translated "construction"), availability, improvement, integration and innovation (in Arabic, al-ibdaa, often rendered "creativity"). Coverage of the 2021 cycle describes the top stage as entities offering creative and innovative models across digital transformation areas, and integration as internal integration across departments and external integration with other entities (Ajel; General Food Security Authority).
• Three compliance levels per standard: full, partial and non-compliance (Saudipedia).
• Innovation is explicit. The 2023 measurement added an "Innovation in Digital Transformation" component to encourage outstanding digital models, creative solutions and emerging technologies (Saudipedia).
• Recent results. The average across government entities reached 88.30% in the 2025 measurement, up from 87.14% in 2024, with 240 entities taking part; the Authority has announced the 2026 index (Al-Watan).

Two things follow. Qiyas is first a digital transformation measurement; innovation sits at the top of its maturity ladder rather than as a separate index. And as averages rise, reaching integration becomes common, so real differentiation moves to the innovation stage.

Why entities stall at the innovation threshold

The early stages are built with policies, systems and procedures, which the digital transformation department largely controls. Innovation needs something else: genuinely new models, tried with real beneficiaries, with impact you can show. Three obstacles recur:

• Innovation treated as a file, not a practice. Whatever can be called "innovative" is gathered in the last month, and the evidence is thin because the work was never designed to prove anything.
• Digital transformation working alone. Services and processes belong to operational departments. If they are not partners from the start, the models stay in slide decks.
• No measured impact. An attractive idea with no baseline and no result does not survive an assessor asking "what changed?".

Preparing, step by step

1. Read the current methodology with service owners

Start with the Authority's methodology for the current cycle and read it in a session with the departments that own services, not with the digital team alone. Agree which standards touch integration and innovation, and what the methodology accepts as evidence for each.

2. Map where you honestly stand

For each area, classify your position in the methodology's terms: full, partial or absent. For every integration standard, ask whether integration with other entities actually works or is only documented. An entity that has not settled integration will struggle to convince on innovation. An ecosystem map helps you see the real integration links with partner entities.

3. Choose three to five real innovation initiatives

Do not try to prove innovation everywhere. Pick a few initiatives that touch an important service or an influential process, each owned by a named operational manager. The test: will it change the beneficiary's experience or the efficiency of the work in a way you can measure within the cycle? Use portfolio mapping to balance near-term improvements with one or two bigger bets.

4. Design each initiative to prove its impact

Before you build anything, write a clear hypothesis, a baseline and one success measure for each initiative, using a hypothesis test. Draw the service before and after with a service blueprint. Evidence then becomes a by-product of the work rather than a file produced later.

5. Assign ownership and set a monthly rhythm

Use a RACI to name who owns each standard, each initiative and its evidence. Hold a short monthly review: what moved, what new evidence exists, what stalled. Evidence gathered monthly is far stronger than evidence gathered in submission week, which is the subject of evidence assessors accept.

6. Run a mock assessment two months before submission

Ask a team outside the initiatives to review the evidence as an assessor would. Is it dated? Does it prove the standard as written? Is impact measured? What they find two months out can be fixed; what is found after submission cannot.

7. Review after results and start the next cycle at once

When results arrive, hold a retrospective with initiative owners: which evidence held, which did not, and why. Start the next cycle from there, not from zero.

An example

Illustrative. A regional municipality in Saudi Arabia that reached the integration stage in the previous cycle wanted to move to innovation. The digital transformation team read the methodology with the municipal services and urban planning departments and found that several integration standards were documented but not working with two partner entities, so they fixed those first.

They then chose three initiatives: redesigning the building permit journey around the applicant's needs; a pilot for receiving and automatically routing visual pollution reports; and a joint data-sharing trial with a utility provider that removed a step for applicants. Each had an operational owner, a hypothesis and a baseline for processing time. At a monthly review the team stopped the second initiative after the pilot showed the real bottleneck was internal triage, not the reporting channel, and recorded the decision and its reason. That record itself became evidence of an innovation process mature enough to know when to stop.

Do's and don'ts

Do

• Start every cycle from the current methodology, not from memory of the last one.
• Make operational departments partners in the initiatives from day one.
• Design each initiative to produce its own evidence: hypothesis, baseline, dated result.
• Record decisions to stop, with reasons, as carefully as successes.
• Connect Qiyas preparation to a wider innovation maturity assessment, so the external measurement is not your only driver.

Don't

• Don't relabel ordinary technology projects as "innovative models". Assessors can tell.
• Don't gather evidence in the final week.
• Don't let a consultancy write the files for you while the work stays the same.
• Don't confuse Qiyas with ISO 56001 certification; they have different purposes and owners. See ISO 56001 explained for practitioners.
• Don't paste the standards' wording into internal decks instead of discussing what they mean for your services.

Questions people ask

What are the stages of the Qiyas digital transformation measurement? Five: establishment, availability, improvement, integration and innovation (creativity). At the top stage an entity offers creative and innovative models across digital transformation areas. Always confirm names and details in the current cycle's methodology from the Digital Government Authority.

How do we move from integration to innovation in Qiyas? Make integration genuinely work first, then choose a few real innovation initiatives owned by service owners, design each to prove impact with a baseline and a measured result, and gather evidence monthly through the cycle.

Is Qiyas the same as ISO 56001? No. Qiyas is issued by the Digital Government Authority to assess digital transformation in Saudi government entities. ISO 56001:2024 is a voluntary international standard for an innovation management system, certified by accredited bodies. Work on one can support the other, but neither replaces the other.

Close

To see real integration links, start with an ecosystem map; to design initiatives that prove their impact, use a service blueprint and a hypothesis test; to assign roles, a RACI. The hub pillar is how to assess your organisation's innovation maturity.

Sources: Saudipedia, "Digital Transformation Index"; Ajel, coverage of the 2021 measurement results; Al-Watan, 2025 measurement results; General Food Security Authority, news on its 2024 result; Islamic University of Madinah, index page.