Khalid Alissa

In this story

1. A career between services and security
2. Two responsibilities within one technology team
3. Small lessons for an immediate task
4. A hospital system with named partners
5. Examining digital health readiness
6. Studying what users do
7. Security awareness outside the laboratory
8. Partnerships and student projects

A career between services and security

Dr. Khalid Adnan Alissa's professional work at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University brings together technology operations, information security and computing education. The university identifies him as Dean of the College of Computer Science and Information Technology and an assistant professor in its Networks and Communications Department. Its Saudi Aramco Cyber Security Chair also lists him as co-supervisor for development and community partnership. His earlier published account as an ICT leader adds another perspective: responsibility for the services on which academic and administrative work depends.

The chair's biography traces his education from a bachelor's degree in computer and information systems at King Saud University to a master's degree and doctorate in information security at Queensland University of Technology. It names access control, social engineering, network security, security management and computer forensics among his areas of expertise. Those interests appear in different forms across his work: research into security behaviour, public awareness workshops and the management of university systems. His professional account moves between the technical design of services and the people expected to use them.

In The Enterprise World's profile, Alissa describes an institution spread across multiple campuses and hospitals, with a large community of users and limited resources. His initial challenge was to close the gap between what users expected and what the technology organisation could deliver. The account places the work inside an existing university rather than a new operation. Day-to-day services had to continue while teams, processes and responsibilities were being changed. Alissa describes both the pressure of maintaining that continuity and the effort required to rebuild the way work was organised.

Two responsibilities within one technology team

Alissa's response, as described in the published feature, included restructuring teams and reworking processes until everyday operations became more stable. He then separated operational and technical affairs from improvement and quality, with a manager responsible for each. This division gave the immediate work of running services and the continuing work of improving them their own leadership attention. His account describes extra hours spent redesigning processes while ordinary demands still had to be met, rather than a transition made after the institution's other activities had stopped.

The university's ICT dean's message describes the service function in similarly broad terms. It connects academic and administrative activity with effective technology and identifies timely information and analytical reporting as support for decision-makers. The message also gives attention to standards, employee awareness and the quality of services. Alongside that institutional description, Alissa's published management advice is to understand the employer's expectations and deliver results aligned with them without passing every operational detail back upwards. His account places responsibility for execution within the team leading the work.

He describes employee development as a separate organisational responsibility. A dedicated department examined performance, identified gaps and directed training towards them. The feature also records a nine-category approach to considering performance and growth. Alissa's account gives particular weight to knowing employees well enough to recognise who needs encouragement and who is ready for greater responsibility. He describes cases in which a change of role or department helped a person work more effectively. In that explanation, development includes the fit between an employee and the work, as well as training within an existing position.

Small lessons for an immediate task

The shift to remote work provides one of the clearest episodes in Alissa's account. The technology was already in place, he explains, but employees still needed guidance about where to go and what to do. His team introduced short online courses called Training Pills. Rather than offer a single broad introduction to remote working, the lessons addressed individual tasks. Signing a document on a computer and signing one on a smartphone were treated as separate courses because the practical steps differed.

The published feature describes lessons as short as fifteen minutes. Alissa presents them as part of the support behind the transition, alongside the university's existing technology. The immediate teaching task was therefore different from the university's formal academic programmes: it was to help a colleague complete a particular piece of work using a device available to them. The episode gives a concrete example of the employee-development approach he describes elsewhere, with a defined need translated into a focused learning activity that staff could use while continuing their duties.

His ICT account also names systems developed within the institution, including My ID, the Students Skills Registry, the Field Training Portal and the Social Responsibility Bank. These examples span identity, student experience, practical placement and community participation. He describes the university as developing much of its own software and systems, with some products useful beyond the institution. The account locates digital development in identifiable services rather than a single general project. It also shows the range of users and workflows the technology team was expected to support.

A hospital system with named partners

The university's hospital work provides a separate, documented example of technology change. A Gulf News corporate report records the go-live of InterSystems TrakCare at King Fahd Hospital of the University in Al Khobar. The announcement identifies the university hospital, Systems of Strategic Business Solutions and InterSystems as the organisations involved. Its initial scope includes the clinical suite, patient administration and TrakCare Laboratory Enterprise. Alissa, speaking as the university's ICT dean, welcomes the launch and connects it with plans for greater automation and a paperless hospital.

His statement describes intended improvements in customer satisfaction and the automation of processes. The hospital's general manager and e-health leadership also speak in the announcement, alongside the supplier and implementation partner. Their roles keep the project situated within a wider institutional team. Alissa's contribution in the report is the university technology perspective: how a common health-information system fits the plans for digital services and reduced paper-based work across the hospital.

The same announcement sets out a further phase covering revenue-cycle management, dental-system integration and an oncology module, with an additional intention to connect to NPHIES, the national health and insurance exchange platform. Those elements are presented as subsequent work, distinct from the clinical, administrative and laboratory systems already announced as live. The project expands the setting of Alissa's technology leadership beyond the campus office or classroom and into clinical operations, where different departments need access to connected information.

Examining digital health readiness

Alissa also co-authored a Digital Health study examining readiness for digital change at healthcare facilities in the Eastern Province. The researchers used the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's rapid-assessment questionnaire, with responses from ten public and private facilities in Al Khobar, Dammam and Dhahran. The study examined four areas: interoperability, governance and workforce, person-enabled health and predictive analytics. Its author-contribution statement credits all authors equally with conceptualisation, data collection, project administration, analysis, initial writing and review of the final draft.

In that sample, governance and workforce had the highest median score, while predictive analytics had the lowest. Private facilities recorded higher overall scores than public ones, but the authors found no statistically significant relationship between facility type and the digital-transformation dimensions. The study's conclusions were bounded by a small regional sample and the rapid-assessment instrument. Alissa's participation places his technology-management work beside research into how health organisations assess their capability to use digital services, including the workforce, governance and information exchange surrounding those services.

Studying what users do

Social engineering is a named research interest in Alissa's academic biography and a subject of his published work. In a co-authored paper in the International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, he and his collaborators examine a specific measurement problem: whether answers to a security questionnaire reflect what people actually do. The researchers propose a game-based instrument that turns questions about policy compliance into scenarios. Their aim is to collect responses through decisions made inside those situations rather than rely only on a conventional survey.

Alissa and his co-authors selected five areas: passwords, identity, email, sensitive data and physical or resource security. After expert review of the policies, questionnaire items were turned into workplace scenarios. In one, an employee needs to send a report while also attending a meeting. The choices reveal whether the participant would allow a colleague access to their email. Another asks the player to return and lock a door or assume a colleague will do it. The authors link these decisions to the protection of devices and sensitive information. The instrument contained twenty questions. Some scenarios supplied answers to related questions through one decision, so the analysis examined paired items as well as the five overall security measures.

Among the forty-eight full responses in the pilot, the authors report that nineteen participants chose to delegate the email task in a way the instrument classified as inconsistent with the security policy. Nine selected the option of relying on someone else to lock the door. The paper analyses those responses within its pilot group. Alissa's co-authors include ICT and quality-assurance researcher Bashar Aldeeb, alongside collaborators from computing, preparatory studies and management information systems. Several author biographies identify cybersecurity students with interests in social engineering.

Security awareness outside the laboratory

The university's cybersecurity-chair newsletter records Alissa presenting a workshop for Dammam airports under the cooperation programme between the airport organisation and the university. Its subject was social engineering and the manipulation of people, with cybersecurity awareness as its purpose. The same newsletter identifies him as an information-security consultant and a founding member and deputy general supervisor of the chair in that account. The workshop placed his research interest in a staff-awareness setting outside the university. His newsletter biography identifies consultancy and training alongside academic and management responsibilities, while the Saudi Society of Emergency Medicine speaker profile likewise lists experience as a university CIO, cybersecurity head and teacher.

A different community initiative connects the university's technology work with access to equipment. Arabic reporting describes a programme encouraging people to donate unused computers for students with limited incomes. The process involved the community-service deanship, the computing college, the ICT deanship and the computer-refurbishment charity Ertiqa. The college received and prepared equipment, the technology organisation carried out cybersecurity checks, and Ertiqa refurbished devices and installed software for remote learning before distribution. Alissa comments on the value of reusing surplus devices responsibly and helping someone who needs a computer.

In that account, the programme's social purpose and its technical steps are closely connected. A donated machine needs preparation and checking before it can become a useful learning device. Alissa's contribution is described within a joint programme, with other university leaders and the charity explaining their own responsibilities. The initiative adds another concrete dimension to his work with digital services: access to an online system also depends on whether a student has suitable equipment with which to use it.

Partnerships and student projects

Reporting on the university's memorandum with the Eastern Province Municipality names Alissa as its signatory in his technology-centre leadership role. The municipality's quality director, Majed Al-Rouqi, signed for the other party. The proposed cooperation covers artificial intelligence, the internet of things and digital development. It also includes scientific and research conferences, consultation, training and the exchange of specialist knowledge. The memorandum sets out a framework for collaboration and the protection of each party's intellectual-property rights.

His work as computing-college dean is visible in Al Yaum's account of a graduation-project exhibition. At that exhibition, Alissa described ninety-two projects involving more than four hundred and fifty students across cybersecurity and digital forensics, artificial intelligence, computer science and computer information systems. He thanked the Saudi Aramco Cyber Security Chair for its support and described the event as a meeting point for students, employers and supporting organisations.

Ten projects at that exhibition were undertaken for external organisations, with faculty members participating across the event. Alissa also reported twenty-five research papers, divided between international conferences, local conferences and journals. Students presented technical work alongside those research outputs. The university president opened the exhibition and recognised the winning teams.

Alongside the projects, the event included a competition involving the protection of industrial systems and workshops on innovation, entrepreneurship and invention, organised with the university's innovation and entrepreneurship institute. Alissa's remarks place those activities within the development of students' work and its contact with organisations beyond the college. Together with his earlier accounts of employee training, digital services and applied security research, this episode keeps the focus on a recurring part of his career: connecting computing knowledge with a task, a user and an institution that needs to put it to work.