Larry Quinlan, global chief information officer at global professional services firm Deloitte, says T&T and the Caribbean region must come up with ways to bridge the digital divide.
"I think there is a significant digital divide. One reason is the cost. In a home with scarce resources sometimes technology is not necessarily the things we would spend money on. There are a number of ways to get access to technology and I am sure T&T is working on ways to have its citizens access technology like computers in schools," he told the T&T Guardian after delivering the feature address at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of T&T's (ICATT) two day conference at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Port-of-Spain.
Quinlan said the digital divide is a business and social issue."I believe that here in the Caribbean, people need to focus on technology skills for students to ensure that later in life they are prepared for technology," he said.He said internationally Deloitte spends more than a billion dollars on technology annually."We have multiple businesses and it is not just accounting. We are one of the world's largest management consulting firms," he said.
Quinlan said Deloitte does not treat the Caribbean as a "step child" and the same technology systems the company employ worldwide are also used in T&T.
"We use the audit platform technology as well as we use mobility, so you will find our people outfitted with the platforms, PDAs and it is an important part of how we operate here. For any accountant professional not to be immersed in technology to deal with our clients' trends, in my view, would be detrimental to our operations. If we are to be relevant technology plays a fundamental part of what we do," he said.
He said it is a wrong notion that the accounting profession has not kept up to date with the latest available technology."The reason I think it is a little bit more invisible is that some of the trends, like Cloud and mobility and those things, do not feature prominently.
"If you look at the idea of working closely with corporations all over the world, most of their accounting systems are on computers in order to do effective accounting and auditing. We have to be well versed in technology and use technology to conduct audits and we have been doing this for the last 20 years," Quinlan said.
