GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

T&T is do­ing bet­ter than Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and many oth­er coun­tries in its dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion ini­tia­tives but it needs to do it faster, said Huawei ex­ec­u­tive Luis Guil­lot.

Guil­lot was de­liv­er­ing the keynote ad­dress at the 2020 Youth Em­pow­er­ment Fo­rum held vir­tu­al­ly by the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly’s Di­vi­sion of Fi­nance and the Econ­o­my.

Guil­lot, who is the Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Of­fi­cer of Gov­ern­ment So­lu­tions for Huawei Latin Amer­i­ca, was speak­ing on the top­ic Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion is No Longer an Op­tion.

Not­ing that the first place in the world he vis­it­ed that took bit­coin to pay for some­thing was a restau­rant in Port-of-Spain, Guil­lot added, “The dig­i­tal econ­o­my in T&T its fair­ly well ahead. You have a cou­ple of com­pa­nies who are do­ing very good things…but you need to keep that ball rolling. It’s rolling but it needs to roll faster.”

He iden­ti­fied band­width as the biggest im­ped­i­ment to faster dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion in the Caribbean and in T&T.

“You need to do some­thing about get­ting a na­tion­al broad­band, get­ting con­nec­tiv­i­ty, so that every­one in the coun­try can get good ac­cess, can get on the dig­i­tal econ­o­my,” Guil­lot said.

He ex­plained nor­mal­ly, every one has In­ter­net ser­vice with a big down­load but­ton but a small up­load but­ton.

And now, with the de­mands of COVID, Guil­lot ad­vised that peo­ple have to ap­ply an in­tel­li­gent plat­form to han­dle all the in­for­ma­tion re­quired for more ef­fec­tive de­liv­ery of gov­ern­ment ser­vices, re­mote work­ing, on­line busi­ness­es, ed­u­ca­tion and health­care.

“Such a plat­form would put gov­ern­ment ser­vices on a sin­gle ser­vice hub, cre­at­ing a one stop shop so that, in­stead of cit­i­zens hav­ing to go to all the dif­fer­ent gov­ern­ment of­fices to get some­thing done, there would be a sin­gle of­fice where “on the back end the gov­ern­ment does the walk­ing for us, not we the cit­i­zens do­ing the walk­ing for them,”Guil­lot said.

He said two smart city fea­tures that could help de­vel­op a Dig­i­tal To­ba­go are pub­lic WIFI and smart poles that would pro­vide vis­i­tors with a bet­ter tourism ex­pe­ri­ence, adding that pub­lic WIFI could al­so be used as a source of rev­enue gen­er­a­tion for To­ba­go.

Smart poles, Guil­lot added are equipped with video cam­eras for bet­ter se­cu­ri­ty, sen­sors to de­tect con­t­a­m­i­nants in the air and, with a push of a but­ton, per­sons could get con­tact to an emer­gency ser­vice.

On how long dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion could take, Guil­lot es­ti­mat­ed that a nor­mal trans­for­ma­tion of a city, which had the plan de­vel­oped and had be­gun im­ple­men­ta­tion, could take six months to three years, de­pend­ing on size of project.

“But you can do some­thing good, re­al­ly, re­al­ly fast in six months,” he added.

The Fo­rum was part of the THA and the Di­vi­sion of Fi­nance and the Econ­o­my’s se­ries of vir­tu­al sem­i­nars fo­cused on eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

In his open­ing re­marks, THA Chief Sec­re­tary An­cil Den­nis al­so em­pha­sised that to sur­vive this dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od re­quires dis­ci­pline and a change in at­ti­tude.