BitDepth 1365

MARK LYNDERSAY

THE PROBLEM with public service technology adoption is a governance problem. To truly understand the challenge, it's important to consider how Trinidad and Tobago is governed.

Architecture

A political party, like a business, functions like a living organism, mobilising around its reason for being.

For living creatures, it is the continuation of life. For business, survival is defined by profitability. For a political party, it's acquiring a majority of votes.

As with living creatures, this is not a hard line.

A party in power has two responsibilities: to govern the country profitably and to ensure its continuance in power.

To ensure that there is balance between these often divergent ambitions, the practice of governance is filtered through the public service; a permanent institution that's expected to offer apolitical advice on the proposals of government and to execute its programmes.

By the second oil boom - between 1999 and 2008 - impatience with public service delays in execution and the perception of a stalled bureaucracy led to the creation of quasi-government agencies that existed outside ministries and a rise in external consultants that effectively replaced the role of senior public servants.

Employment

Working as a public servant has long held the allure of tenure. There was little expectation of job satisfaction, and advancement was measured in decades, and usually unrelated to job performance, but the civil service was a lifelong career.

Unsurprisingly, government is the largest single employer in the country.

Every effort at transforming the public service has resulted in total defeat while political interference has increased.

Digital transformation promises greater efficiency, empowering fewer people to do more work with more accountability for work delivery. This is a dramatic departure in thinking from the status quo of the public service and has proven largely unwelcome.

Tenure

Any serious digital transformation project will take years, perhaps even a decade to complete. The challenge facing the Government in digitalising the public sector isn't that different from the undertaking to create the Point Lisas Industrial Estate.

But that happened under the marathon run of the PNM, between 1962 and 1986. Since then, no government has been guaranteed anything beyond the five-year term to which they have been elected, which has resulted in a continuing emphasis on short and medium-term project design.

Five years in office is actually just three. The first year is given over to settling in, and the last year sells the electorate on the value of the party's incumbency.

To achieve long-term transformation goals, these projects should, with the agreement of the Opposition, be moved out of active government to become true public service projects with budgets and objectives that are separated from the immediacy of political expediency.

The violently adversarial relationship of both major parties, the quiet d