Digital governance - being left behind

My riding partner, Steve, will surely assert that I am once again flogging the seemingly dead or dying horse of our country’s digital ambitions.

But I am prepared to risk insult and mockery for the sake of yet again placing on public record my belief that the current transition to things digital currently confronts emotional and institutional barriers constructed of reinforced brick and steel.

I have witnessed the techies tear both dark and greying hair from their heads over this. At a time when serious societies are mulling the positives and negatives of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) – several jumps ahead of simple digitalisation - there are local and regional bureaucracies and private sector entities stumbling over questions of first phase conversion and the application of rapidly ageing, automated solutions.

The experts consider people like me to be citizen or customer “users”, because we don’t have to master the technical and operational requirements but need at least to acknowledge some amazing leaps in our ability to conduct complex transactions using digital technology.

I have no intention of getting involved in big people business, but I am almost certain that the current unseemly fiasco involving the Minister of Finance and the Auditor General is not completely disassociated from this phenomenon of bungling unpreparedness.

I tried to follow the minister’s explanations which sought to get to the bottom of the accounting anomaly in question and it resonated in so many familiar ways when you consider the repeated admonitions published in this space.

That this explains the conundrum and paints the misapplication of an automated process as a best-case scenario is piteous, to say the least.

But that’s as far as I will go on this question.

So, let’s also have a look at what’s happening at our airports (and perhaps our seaports). I do not sense the hand of ill intent in the current state of digital underdevelopment. But there is, at minimum, aggressive hesitation with employing readily available, simple technological solutions.

Electronic Embarkation-Disembarkation (ED) cards, for example, are now standard fare in several Caribbean countries – applied in varying degrees of sophistication, of course, because they too face Luddite apprehensions.

Over here, we are still completing paper documents with information already in an efficient Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) employed by most airlines/Caribbean countries and which can be accessed by authorities here by a swipe of a barcode or passport at an immigration desk or kiosk (remember those?).

The use of these useless forms in T&T is even more ridiculous these days because you are now required to hand write in any arbitrary space (because there is no field in the current departure form) the expiry date of your passport. Refuse to do it and you aren’t going anywhere! Instead of the situation getting better, it is getting worse.

Sure. It’s not just us. I am aware of what transpires among our regional neighbours. Electronic processes are also viewed there as serious threats to authority and both high and low-level power. The use of electronic ED cards is, consequently, not always a flawless process.

Now, for the ttconnect website – this marvel of digital governance that promised a one-stop experience when accessing online government services, but which is now reduced to being a directory of links to government offices.

The cold, hard fact is that this significant portal which could have at least symbolised recognition of a new digital reality has not been working as it should for almost two years now.

Back in 2018 when the country’s ICT Plan 2018-2022 was being introduced to hopeful businesspeople, late Minister of Public Administration, Marlene McDonald was quoted as saying: “The world is changing and it is doing so much more rapidly than before, thanks to constant evolutions and innovations in the field of technology. It certainly does not serve our country’s interests if we sit idly by and allow ourselves to be left behind while the rest of the world moves on.”

Six years later, can we say we are being left behind? My pal, Steve, rather cruelly concludes that we are fading from view in the rear-view mirrors of most of the rest of the world at our level of economic development.