The pub­lic health cri­sis that has forced many in T&T to work and study re­mote­ly has al­so ex­posed the size of the dig­i­tal di­vide that now ur­gent­ly needs to be filled.

The size of the un­der­tak­ing was not in­di­cat­ed in the am­bi­tious digi­ti­sa­tion plan out­lined in the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment’s elec­tion man­i­festo. As it con­tin­ues in Gov­ern­ment, the par­ty has added to the Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion port­fo­lio the task of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and put it in the hands of Sen­a­tor Allyson West.

El­e­vat­ed from her pre­vi­ous as­sign­ment as Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance, Ms West now leads the dri­ve to pro­vide high-speed broad­band in­ter­net ac­cess as part of the dri­ve to ex­pand the coun­try’s ICT in­fra­struc­ture.

The man­date al­so in­cludes the cre­ation of an elec­tron­ic pop­u­la­tion reg­is­ter of every cit­i­zen and res­i­dent, re­mov­ing the need for cit­i­zens to sub­mit da­ta sep­a­rate­ly to each agency —achiev­ing this and oth­er tech­no­log­i­cal ob­jec­tives with sys­tems that are trans­par­ent and se­cure for the use of da­ta

There are al­so ex­pect­ed to be ad­vance­ments in what is de­scribed as the “e-Gov­er­nance Ecosys­tem” en­com­pass­ing the Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dow (SEW) pro­gramme—TTBi­zLink and oth­er ini­tia­tives that are cur­rent­ly in var­i­ous stages of im­ple­men­ta­tion.

These gi­ant steps in­to digi­ti­sa­tion are now un­avoid­able and mea­sures must be de­ployed soon­er rather than lat­er. That is one of the tough lessons of the pan­dem­ic—ready or not, the road ahead re­quires fun­da­men­tal changes in the way we live, work and con­nect with one an­oth­er.

So far, with all the glitch­es and chal­lenges en­coun­tered in pro­vid­ing ed­u­ca­tion on­line, there are im­por­tant ques­tions to be ad­dressed about the ap­proach­es be­ing adopt­ed. It is a steep learn­ing curve for sure, but the com­mit­ment re­quired to dri­ve this process seems to be in­suf­fi­cient.

It takes a com­bi­na­tion of tal­ent and tech­nol­o­gy to bring about dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and the myr­i­ad of tech­ni­cal chal­lenges to be faced re­quires that the right peo­ple be on board ear­ly on.

The pub­lic ser­vice, now forced to func­tion dif­fer­ent­ly, will need to be much more dig­i­tal­ly lit­er­ate and must func­tion more ef­fi­cient­ly in the post-COVID world. Chang­ing roles, chang­ing de­part­ments and sig­nif­i­cant changes to or­gan­i­sa­tion­al struc­tures will have to be on the agen­da of gov­ern­ment min­istries and the var­i­ous state agen­cies.

There is al­so the ur­ban-rur­al di­vide to be con­front­ed be­cause it is im­por­tant for all com­mu­ni­ties, so there must be na­tion­wide ac­cess to high-speed broad­band net­works which are key en­ablers for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.

Hope­ful­ly, in the Na­tion­al Bud­get to be pre­sent­ed on Oc­to­ber 5, there will be some de­tails on how Gov­ern­ment plans to go about de­vel­op­ing the con­nec­tiv­i­ty, ser­vice and skills which need to be spe­cial­ly adapt­ed to the unique needs of T&T.

If they get it right, there will be many ben­e­fits, in­clud­ing im­proved pub­lic ad­min­is­tra­tion and re­duc­tion in bu­reau­cra­cy in ways that bring added val­ue to the econ­o­my.