Not­ing that big da­ta is trans­form­ing the way glob­al firms and gov­ern­ments do busi­ness, Selvon Ram­roop, deputy CEO of the Na­tion­al In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nol­o­gy Com­pa­ny (iGovTT), is cham­pi­oning its use in de­liv­ery of en­hanced ser­vices to cit­i­zens of T&T.Cit­i­zens and busi­ness­es can ben­e­fit from the analy­sis of large da­ta sets or big da­ta to find an­swers that en­able cost re­duc­tions, time re­duc­tions, new prod­uct de­vel­op­ment, op­ti­mised of­fer­ings and smarter busi­ness de­ci­sion-mak­ing.

Ram­roop said a few gov­ern­ments around the world have been earnest­ly at­tempt­ing to as­sim­i­late big da­ta in vary­ing de­grees in­to their pub­lic-sec­tor op­er­a­tions to achieve a sim­ple ob­jec­tive."They are try­ing to in­te­grate and analyse large or­ders of in­for­ma­tion to ad­dress na­tion­al pri­or­i­ties such as pro­vid­ing easy and equal ac­cess to pub­lic ser­vices; dri­ving greater cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion in pub­lic af­fairs; and in­creas­ing trans­paren­cy," he said.

"It is in­ter­est­ing to note that the gov­ern­ments that are ac­tive­ly pur­su­ing big da­ta projects tend to be those that are tra­di­tion­al­ly count­ed among high­er per­form­ing economies."Ram­roop was speak­ing at the re­cent launch of the Glob­al In­for­ma­tion and Tech­nol­o­gy Re­port 2014 at the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness.

Cit­ing ex­am­ples of suc­cess­ful ap­pli­ca­tions of big da­ta, he said Sin­ga­pore now ben­e­fits from apps such as ACRA on the Go which al­lows a user to search a gov­ern­ment busi­ness and cor­po­rate reg­istry data­base to see if a busi­ness is reg­is­tered in Sin­ga­pore. An­oth­er app, be­foreUdig, us­es map da­ta as the ba­sis for help­ing con­trac­tors as­cer­tain the pres­ence of un­der­ground pipes and ca­bles in and around any pro­posed dig site, there­by help­ing pre­serve valu­able as­sets like pipes and util­i­ty ca­bles dur­ing in­fra­struc­tur­al work projects.

"iGovTT has and con­tin­ues to af­firm its sup­port for open da­ta and open gov­ern­ment which all strad­dle the path of big da­ta. We would very much like to see the em­u­la­tion of suc­cess­ful da­ta ini­tia­tives al­ready start­ed by our for­eign coun­ter­parts," he said.Ram­roop said it is for this rea­son that iGovTT had, in the past, forged mean­ing­ful part­ner­ships with coun­tries like Sin­ga­pore."We aim to learn from their project suc­cess­es and repli­cate as much as we can here in Trinidad and To­ba­go," he said.

iGovTT has man­aged its own big da­ta project with the de­sign and de­ploy­ment of the Gov­ern­ment Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Net­work brand­ed Gov­NeTT–the first of its kind in the Caribbean. This project has seen more than 500 sites con­nect­ed to the por­tal, with man­aged ac­cess to the Gov­ern­ment Da­ta Cen­tre.

The 13th edi­tion of the Glob­al In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy re­port pub­lished by the World Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum pro­vides a com­pre­hen­sive as­sess­ment of net­worked readi­ness, or how pre­pared an econ­o­my is to ap­ply the ben­e­fits of in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy to pro­mote eco­nom­ic growth and well-be­ing. The re­sults of the re­port were re­leased na­tion­al­ly by the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness in col­lab­o­ra­tion with iGovTT.

Based on the 2014 re­port, T&T is on­ly one of three coun­tries in the Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean re­gion (LAC) whose rank­ing has im­proved.