BitDepth#1493
Mark Lyndersay
THE MINISTRY of Digital Transformation published its National Digital Transformation Strategy for 2024-2027 and it is, in a word, an embarrassment.
Under the title BOLD (Building Our Lives Digitally), the ministry proceeds, over 88 pages that manage to be both verbose and vague, to rehash the talking points it has been spewing with great enthusiasm ever since it began communicating with the public.
In his introduction, Minister Hassel Bacchus restates his ambitions for a “Digital government that collectively offers a new way to address the end-to-end consumption and delivery of goods and services to customers using appropriate digital technology.”
He goes on to revisit previously stated notions of how this is to be achieved via the concepts of a digital society, digital economy and digital governance.
The report references a digital readiness assessment (DRA) that the government worked on with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The 2022 DRA report places TT at the midpoint of successful digital transformation – the “systematic” stage – in which a nation is said to be “advancing in key areas of digital transformation based on identified priority areas.”
The BOLD document references anything in the DRA that paints a positive image of TT’s digital transformation, inclusive of charts and analytical frameworks.
And some of the DRA’s conclusions are sketchy.
The UNDP finds, for instance, that there are “high levels of digital literacy” in this country, a factoid that runs counter to the ministry’s very public efforts to raise levels of digital literacy nationwide.
A thing either is or it isn’t, and here I’d argue that outside the air-conditioned offices where these reports get written, digital literacy is both rudimentary and task-focused, quite some distance from the kind of confidently interpretive approach that’s needed to drive the ministry’s transformation aspirations.
Here are some findings by the UNDP that BOLD does not trumpet.
Seventy per cent of 90 stakeholder respondents felt that the current digital economy offered few to no benefits for citizens.
Only 289 of 1,373 respondents characterised the government’s digital transformation as either bold or very bold.
In its fourth year, the ministry is trumpeting a national strategy that reads more like a manifesto than a real-world action plan.
There’s no effort to establish timelines, name any projects to achieve this hefty menu of goals, cite progress on existing projects, offer statistical learnings from its own internal evaluations of learned reality, or even to suggest what all this ambitious word salad will cost the country.
That doesn’t stop the ministry from claiming successes for development projects it had absolutely nothing to do with, including projects by FILMCO (online streaming), the Central Bank (e-money) and private sector telecommunications companies (broadband connectivity).
There’s no mention of Parlour, the e-shop that TSTT was directed to create in 2022 that’s quiet
