Mark Lyn­der­say

There were a lot of words spo­ken at the "ini­ti­a­tion" of the Glob­al Ser­vices Pro­mo­tion Pro­gramme, a project of the Min­istry of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment and the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IADB).

Most of those words were as­pi­ra­tional, seek­ing to spur the en­thu­si­asm of both the au­di­ence present at the Yara Au­di­to­ri­um of the Arthur Lok Jack School for Busi­ness and the streamed video au­di­ence and the tar­get au­di­ence for the de­vel­op­ment fund, set at $18 mil­lion.

Some of those words have al­ready been re­port­ed, no­tably Dr Ter­rence Far­rell's warn­ing that by 2030 T&T will cease to be a vi­able oil ex­port­ing econ­o­my and that the same fate awaits our nat­ur­al gas ex­port ca­pac­i­ty by 2050.

What, he won­dered, would the coun­try look like then? The oth­er strik­ing word came from the pro­gramme's cham­pi­on, Tra­cy Hack­shaw, who framed his clos­ing re­marks around "hope." Hack­shaw is ab­solute­ly on tar­get with that sen­ti­ment. He is cor­rect­ly placed in lo­cal ICT gov­er­nance to vi­su­alise the po­ten­tial for tech­nol­o­gy dri­ven de­vel­op­ment of eco­nom­ic dri­vers, and he's been around to wit­ness the stut­ter­ing col­lapse of pre­vi­ous at­tempts to do just what the new Glob­al Ser­vices Pro­gramme has been set up to do.

For­mer Plan­ning Min­is­ter, Dr Bhoen­dratt Tewarie was praised by his suc­ces­sor in the role, Camille Robin­son-Reg­is, for his pi­o­neer­ing ef­forts in lay­ing the ground­work for the fund and set­ting T&T on the road to ICT en­abled di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, we have heard some of these words be­fore from Dr Tewarie him­self, who rather no­to­ri­ous­ly con­fused "in­no­va­tion" with "new" con­tin­u­ous­ly dur­ing his tenure in the Min­istry and presided over sig­nif­i­cant spend­ing on pi­lot projects and proofs of con­cept that have large­ly gone nowhere.

But to sin­gle out Dr Tewarie is to ig­nore the many suc­ces­sive ad­min­is­tra­tions which have tried to wring short-term vote-win­ning tac­tics and at­trac­tive sound­bites out of the long term strate­gic ini­tia­tives pro­posed by the ca­reer tech­nocrats in the pub­lic ser­vice work­ing in the ICT sec­tor.

In­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy de­vel­op­ment has been crip­pled for the last two decades by the em­pha­sis on ex­act­ly that type of nar­row­ly fo­cused think­ing once an ad­min­is­tra­tion re­alis­es it can't hope to reap the div­i­dends of any project that runs longer than their like­ly term in of­fice. It's doubt­ful that a blue-skies project like Point Lisas could even be done to­day. The as­sur­ance of tenure in pub­lic of­fice that en­abled the bold de­vel­op­ment arcs of Dr Er­ic Williams and al­lowed the cre­ation of an "en­er­gy czar" in the per­son of Dr Ken Julien sim­ply doesn't ex­ist any­more.

Dr Julien got to do things politi­cians couldn't en­vi­sion or read­i­ly ex­ploit be­cause he had the ear of a Prime Min­is­ter who wasn't wor­ried about los­ing the next elec­tion. Vir­tu­al­ly all the ma­jor prob­lems fac­ing mod­ern T&T have the same arc of project time as­so­ci­at­ed with them.

ICT de­vel­op­ment, like crime man­age­ment, can on­ly be suc­cess­ful if it's un­der­tak­en with a com­mit­ment to at least ten years of con­tin­u­ous, un­bro­ken fo­cus with no re­gard to cos­met­ic ap­peal on the cam­paign trail. A project like Tamana Park, the Point Lisas of tech­nol­o­gy, has be­come a po­lit­i­cal foot­ball in­stead than the oa­sis of cut­ting edge tech­nol­o­gy de­ploy­ment and in­dus­tri­al scale sup­port it was planned to be­come two decades ago. No po­lit­i­cal tenure, no czar, no Tamana.

Sen­a­tor Paula Gopee-Scoon, Min­is­ter of Trade and In­dus­try, point­ed to the need to sup­port and de­vel­op the ser­vices sec­tor, which she not­ed, em­ploys 80 per cent of the na­tion­al labour force.

She fur­ther not­ed the con­tin­u­ing fa­vor­able rank in glob­al eval­u­a­tions of T&T in the avail­abil­i­ty of tech­nol­o­gy and the con­sis­tent­ly low rank of the coun­try in use of tech­nol­o­gy. The Trade Min­is­ter did not men­tion the un­tidy fact that most of the ser­vices sec­tor is the pub­lic sec­tor, where tech­nol­o­gy adop­tion has been spot­ty at best and, more com­mon­ly, ap­palling.

"Tama­ra Park is a pri­or­i­ty for the gov­ern­ment, civ­il en­gi­neer­ing works are in progress with the 21 lots and the fi­bre op­tic broad­band con­nec­tion has been im­ple­ment­ed," said Ms Gopee-Scoon.

"T&T has sat back far too long idly in the sec­tor."

That's not ex­act­ly true though. T&T has been quite busy in the sec­tor. Of the 12 top web­sites vis­it­ed by cit­i­zens in this coun­try ac­cord­ing to Alexa, four are search sites, two serve dig­i­tal ads, one of­fers streamed pi­rat­ed movies, the rest are Ama­zon, Face­book, Youtube, Wikipedia and In­sta­gram.

A lo­cal web­site doesn't show up un­til po­si­tion 15. For a coun­try that takes pride in its cre­ativ­i­ty, we are al­most ex­clu­sive­ly con­sumers on­line and chang­ing that is go­ing to take con­sid­er­able ef­fort.

As a na­tion gov­erned, we have learned to be land­lords, draw­ing in­come from a dwin­dling as­set, tak­ing salary in­creas­es, and now bor­row­ing against un­cer­tain fu­ture in­come.

The new pro­gramme is an ef­fort to lever­age our re­main­ing as­sets to build our hu­man cap­i­tal and in­tel­lec­tu­al ca­pac­i­ty to cre­ate val­ue, and it's go­ing to be nec­es­sary to take that gam­ble across po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tions with uni­fied will.

Dr Far­rell spoke of "the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the spir­it."

"If we want to trans­form this coun­try, we have to teach it to do some­thing else, per­haps some­thing it hasn't done be­fore," he said.

"That's the chal­lenge of trans­for­ma­tion."

ICT de­vel­op­ment, like crime man­age­ment, can on­ly be suc­cess­ful if it's un­der­tak­en with a com­mit­ment to at least ten years of con­tin­u­ous, un­bro­ken fo­cus with no re­gard to cos­met­ic ap­peal on the cam­paign trail.