A ministerial mandate for digital transformation

BitDepth#1310

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MARK LYNDERSAY

ON MONDAY, the Prime Minister announced the reassignment of Allyson West as Minister of Public Transformation and the appointment of a new Minister of Digital Transformation, Hassel Bacchus.

Bacchus was appointed to the renamed Ministry of Public Transformation in August 2020 in a nod to the pressing demands on the Government to respond to the reality facing the country under covid19 restrictions.

Mr Bacchus will now preside over an arm of government at least nominally tasked with digital transformation.

While the minister will have his own plans, there are some generalities that will clearly demand his attention and require very specific staff dedicated to a range of projects that will now fall under his ministry.

The first task will be to establish clear lines of authority and responsibility.

The ministry will face some specific challenges in articulating its role among the crowd of formal ministries, state agencies and quasi-government agencies that constitute the pervasive presence of the State in Trinidad and Tobago.

The emasculating experience of iGovTT, which was born as a transformation agency and ended up being a eunuch timidly offering up ideas and advice, is a template for how a good idea can go horribly wrong.

The Government can ill-afford to take years or even months crafting and refining the laws and regulations that would adequately empower the operations of the new ministry.

If Hassel Bacchus has used his first year on the job wisely, he would have crafted the frameworks that this new ministry needs to do its work.

The arm of governance will also need cash to do its work. A lot of it. Money to evaluate existing infrastructure, to pay developers to craft and deploy solutions that unify government operations that currently operate in madcap silos of software architecture.

The new minister should push for a big upfront investment in developers to design and iterate an open-source framework it will own and refine based on established best practices in digital governance.

That's only part of the human resources problem that Bacchus will face.

According to the Central Statistical Office's most recent tabulation of employment recording the fourth quarter of 2019, the Government employs 33.3 per cent of the workforce in TT.

In addition to technocrats, the new ministry will need to create a staff profile that mixes technical expertise with bureaucratic navigation skills.

The new ministry will get exactly nowhere with a slate of new-broom hires.

It will need to build out a team of experienced civil servants capable of navigating the considerable bureaucracy and entrenched perspectives that characterise the public service.

If the ministry isn't forced to take people from Public Administration or to inherit legacy appointments, Bacchus will need to cherry-pick existing civil servants suitable for unification roles in the Ministry of Digital Transformation.

The people the ministry needs will need to be culled from a very specific profile of talent and experience and will benefit from low staff numbers operating with a high skill level, the exact opposite of traditional government hiring practice.

And that's before the Public Services Association begins to respond to plans that will inevitably bring significant changes to the employment status of the 80,000 workers it represents.

The 2021 mission will take money, a cadre of skilled experts, a clear strategic plan and the unequivocal, clearly stated advocacy of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet.

Is there enough money to make a true Ministry of Digital Transformation? Enough talent to make these projects happen?

Sufficient steely will to overturn an organisational architecture designed to create a constituency of the gratefully over-employed?

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there.
From next week his Newsday column will appear on Mondays