Concepts of a transformation plan

BitDepth#1493

THE MINISTRY of Digital Transformation has published its National Digital Transformation Strategy for 2024-2027 and it is, in a word, an embarrassment.

Under the title BOLD (Building Our Lives Digitally), the ministry proceeds, over 88 pages that manage to be both verbose and vague, to rehash the talking points it has been spewing with great enthusiasm ever since it began communicating with the public.

In his introduction, the minister, Hassel Bacchus, restates his ambitions for a “Digital government that collectively offers a new way to address the end-to-end consumption and delivery of goods and services to customers using appropriate digital technology.”

He goes on to revisit previously stated notions of how this is to be achieved via the concepts of a digital society, digital economy and digital governance.

The report references a digital readiness assessment (DRA) that the government worked on with the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

The 2022 DRA report places TT at the midpoint of successful digital transformation – the “systematic” stage – in which a nation is said to be “advancing in key areas of digital transformation based on identified priority areas.”

The BOLD document references anything in the DRA that paints a positive image of TT’s digital transformation, inclusive of charts and analytical frameworks.

And some of the DRA’s conclusions are sketchy.

The UNDP finds, for instance, that there are “high levels of digital literacy” in this country, a factoid that runs counter to the ministry’s very public efforts to raise levels of digital literacy nationwide.

A thing either is or it isn’t, and here I’d argue that outside the air-conditioned offices where these reports get written, digital literacy is both rudimentary and task-focused, quite some distance from the kind of confidently interpretive approach that’s needed to drive the ministry’s transformation aspirations.

Here are some findings by the UNDP that BOLD does not trumpet.

Seventy per cent of 90 stakeholder respondents felt the current digital economy offered few to no benefits for citizens.

Only 289 of 1,373 respondents characterised the government’s digital transformation as either bold or very bold.

In its fourth year, the ministry is trumpeting a national strategy that reads more like a manifesto than a real-world action plan.

There’s no effort to establish timelines, name any projects to achieve this hefty menu of goals, cite progress on existing projects, offer statistical learnings from its own internal evaluations of learned reality, or even to suggest what all this ambitious word salad will cost the country.

That doesn’t stop the ministry from claiming successes for development projects it had absolutely nothing to do with, including projects by FILMCO (online streaming), the Central Bank (e-money) and private-sector telecommunications companies (broadband connectivity).

There’s no mention of Parlour, the e-shop that TSTT was directed to create in 2022 that’s quietly disappeared.

The government’s role should be to facilitate change and innovation through effective governance and enabling legislation, but even by that measure, the last four years have been a catastrophic failure with no tangible indicators of useful change, given the determined nebulousness of the BOLD strategy document.

Mr Bacchus and his doddering entourage of ageing, out-of-touch, boys'-club cronies have conspired to create a summary document out of two years’ worth of talking points that advances not a single tangible idea or proposal.

The DRA notes the lack of a strong open-data dashboard, a rather polite way of noting that data provided by the government on its operations is scattered, sporadic and overwhelmingly incomplete.

Here again, an independent effort by UWI, data.tt, demonstrates the value of bringing even a few national datasets online.

Sadly, this isn’t the government’s first effort at digital transformation.

Of the “pioneering” fast-forward project of 2003 and its stillborn successor, the BOLD document notes, “The approach of government has been...minimalistic and light-touch, acknowledging the maturity of the environment and the need to remain flexible, affording protection where required while facilitating open market activity.”

Those two decades of “light touch” have been hallmarked by incompetence, mishandled and stalled projects, and a determined avoidance of public accountability.

Mr Bacchus has the unenviable task of following notable digital failures helmed by Kennedy Swaratsingh, Maxie Cuffie and most recently Allyson West, who each dutifully offered a message of digital advancement in governance while presiding over pappyshow.

Trinidad and Tobago now has a ministry dedicated to digital transformation, but its first major policy statement offers nothing tangible, leverages no metrics for future projects and delivers all the gravitas of the delicate, clearly teflon-coated butterflies that decorate its pages.

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