Mo' budget, mo' ICT promises

Mark Lyndersay -
Mark Lyndersay -

BitDepth #1323

NEWSDAY · BitDepth1324 Narration - 11 - 10 - 2021

FINANCE Minister Colm Imbert had a choice. He could deliver a budget that boldly declared a visionary, if potentially risky, path forward for ICT, or he could refry the beans again.

It's time to reach for your tortilla shells, because that was last week's budget menu.

The Government did make one small but significant change in the new budget, completely reversing the January 2016 decision to tax computers, though books remain on the tax list.

There is a case to be made for conservative planning when restrictive conditions under a pandemic have caused economic slowdowns nationwide.

But after the Government convened a panel of volunteers to design a Roadmap to Recovery, appointed a Digital Transformation Advisory Committee on February 24, and created an entire new ministry to fast-track digital transformation, the public should expect more from the 2021-2022 budget.

In his budget speech, the Finance Minister said, "Our businesses must digitise; they must have online presences that is, they must have a digital footprint, online marketplace and digitally-enabled value chains."

There is no business operating in TT today that doesn't understand that challenge at some level, but the facilitation of electronic payments and digital value transfer proceeds with alarming lethargy.

He also observed that "the e-state apparatus is demonstrating value for money," which is a curious way of describing downloadable PDFs of forms and off-the-shelf appointment booking systems.

The contribution of ICT to GDP is expected to double from four per cent to eight per cent over an unstated time, but it is also unclear how this will happen.

Meanwhile, the core of any serious digital transformation initiative, a data-driven understanding of the country's economy and infrastructure, remains in a state of collapse.

This unusually frank statement of the situation appears in the Social Sector Investment Programme supporting document:

"Challenges of data collection and assessment, and the persistent shortage of statistical personnel and monitoring and evaluation specialists in the public sector, continue as areas for urgent attention.

"Capacity gaps have been identified in the national statistical system that prohibit the collection and timely dissemination of data; even disaggregation remains a challenge."

In the face of this acknowledged failure in data collection and management, how can the Government have a clear idea of where it is now?

The Digital Transformation Ministry will work with $300 million over the next year, $77 million of which will be used to start programmes for a digital society, digital economy and digital government.

The sum of $236 million will be spent on the "improvement of the information techhnology infrastructure of the public service."

What became of the money budgeted for e-government and FinTech over the last three years? Are we starting everything over because there's now a digital transformation ministry?

Offering small businesses an online marketplace ignores the shameful waste that was EnterpriseNETT, the last effort at an online shopping mall that opened exactly one store. It's time that the Government accepts that it isn't good at private enterprise.

WiPay will give you an e-commerce store and a payment option for a structured fee, so why is the Government, which struggles mightily with its online TravelPass, trying to build a wheel it has proven incapable of putting on the road successfully?

A budget that pretends everything worked out well in ICT in 2019 and 2020 is, ultimately, a farce of verbose promises.

Digital transformation thrives in an environment of hard numbers; this failure to be specific is incomprehensible in a country that has had a ministry dedicated to digital transformation for more than a year.

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

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"Mo’ budget, mo’ ICT promises"

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