Covid19: How should governments transform?

“Government digital transformation is no longer an option,” said Luis Guillot, Huawei’s CTO Government Solutions, Latin America, at a Canto Conversations webinar on August 25.

“Governments have to develop the ability to make sense of all the information they are gathering so they can make better decisions. They need to know what happens, when it happens, where it happens, why it happens, who did it, how they did it and what’s coming next.”

Guillot emphasised the importance of gathering information legally and with the understanding of citizens, of putting science above politics and of communicating clearly and regularly with citizens.

Governments, he believes, can readily access the tools to understand the big datasets being created through the gathering of covid19, and that’s necessary to understand how to handle infection rates and patterns.

Those are sensible words, but until covid19, the TT government hadn’t expressed much functional interest in the concept of data as a tool of governance, even after spending an entire term of office paying lip service to the admirable but unreachable idea of a National Statistical Institute to replace the collapsed Central Statistical Office.

As recently as December 2019, Sean O’Brien, head statistician at the Central Statistical Office, said, “A large part of my job is to be taking blame for not supplying data that I don’t get in the first place.”

It’s possible that the failures and successes that have been part of the dat-gathering required for covid19 decisions might have stoked some refreshed interest in data-driven governance in TT, or it might still be considered too wonky to garner suitable political capital.

Regionally, Guillot pointed to several Huawei success stories.

“In Mexico, we developed a network to connect all of the educational processes six years ago. We did not implement distance learning, but all of the schools got internet, the infrastructure to communicate and share their information.

“For online learning, you need a strong network, whether it is provided by carriers or by a national broadband network,” he said.

“Connectivity has to be considered an essential service.”

“Make sure that you have a teaching process that is adapted to this new teaching system and that you have content developed for it. You have to involve the teachers in this and you have to engage parents, because they have to supervise the environment.”

On overall governance, Guillot has specific suggestions.

He urged governments to implement a nationwide identity system and digital signature; something the TT government has said it intends to pursue.

Mobile and online government transactions should replace over-the-counter services, and where they cannot easily be replaced, they should be consolidated into one-stop service centres – something that TTConnect was supposed to become before the will to complete the work fizzled.

The creation of a common situation dashboard for all governance issues that pools skills, data and inventory for more nimble reassignment of resources and capabilities.

Creating a platform for businesses to interact, collaborate and share resources and facilities, an enabling step beyond the single electronic window database that the government has created to simplify business to government interactions that expands to embrace small and medium enterprise support in practical ways.

And finally, Guillot believes that governments should embrace AI-enabled decision-making to make sense of big datasets at speeds closer to real-time.

None of this is easy, he warned.

“Getting buy-in is fairly simple, but it takes will. You have to explain to citizens what you are doing and what’s going to be the benefit and you have to do small, incremental quick wins. People don’t like change, even change for the good.”

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there.