Rapheal John-Lall

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.