Above: Illustration by Funtap/DepositPhotos

BitDepth#1306 for June 17, 2021

If there had been even one major development resulting from the government’s plan to demonstrate digital transformation, it would have been trumpeted from the rooftops. This is a government, after all, that made a great fuss about putting WiFi in a few public buses.

Kirk Henry, CEO of iGovTT, the state agency responsible for advising on ICT execution, has resigned, noting it first on his Linked-In profile a month ago and more publicly during a recent conversation with the Internet Society of TT (ISOC-TT).

He is, apparently, the first CEO to complete a three-year contract and agreed to a second contract before deciding to move on to other opportunities.

This follows other senior-level resignations at the International Financial Centre, which had championed financial technology (FinTech) for much of 2019 and 2020. Those departures came after local Fintech company, WiPay, announced that it was relocating its headquarters to Jamaica.

“Demand,” WiPay’s Aldwyn Wayne told Anthony Wilson in a December interview, “is what is going to drive us to have our base of operation in a specific market.”
That’s already happened and Jamaica has made liberal use of WiPay’s digital cash fulfilment capabilities during extended covid19 lockdowns.

Henry’s ISOC-TT talk sounded like an upbeat exit interview, as he listed the work that iGovTT had done during the pandemic.
In March 2020, the state agency began scenario planning under Henry’s leadership, completed the implementation of an online payment system for the Attorney General’s office, then created a meetings solution for Cabinet and providing training for its members in its use.

iGovTT also implemented a central document management system at the Office of the Prime Minister.
Those efforts were saluted by Minister of National Security Fitzgerald Hinds at a meeting of the Public Accounts (Enterprises) Committee on April 7, 2021.

But responding to questions about institutional challenges by committee vice-chairman Rushton Paray, Henry said, “We propose standards, we contribute.”
“The application of some of our recommendations – because it is not set as policy – is sub-optimal.”

This is at the heart of the running failure of iGovTT, problematically positioned as a state-appointed knowledge resource and advisor that every government agency is free to ignore completely.
It’s as if every county in Trinidad and Tobago could decide whether cars should drive on the right or left of the road within their boundaries, with an equivalent dividend in chaos.

The TT oil and gas sector was led by a group of like-minded, goal-focused individuals who enjoyed the demonstrated support of the political leadership. It was their way or the highway.
There is no equivalent drive to execution in TT public sector ICT development.

In August 2020, Hassel Bacchus was appointed a Senator and Minister in the Ministry of Public Administration, which added “and Digital Transformation” to its name for the occasion.
A year later, the headline story on digitalization is the scanning of 100,000 documents at Town and Country Planning.

In interview in June with Newsday, Hassel Bacchus indulged in the kind of podium-speak generalities that infest official responses to questions about digital transformation.

In the grip of a pandemic that challenged the public health system, neither iGovTT nor the MPADT can point to a single initiative that brought ICT effectively to bear on that crisis.
The iGovTT e-appointment web app briefly listed the Eastern Regional Health Authority, but now only hosts an access point to the Registrar General.

If there was ever a time to push for a cohesive digital network for secure transfer of patient case records between RHA’s and IP enabled communication, this was it.

“Everyone talks about Estonia,” Kirk Henry said at the ISOC-TT meeting, “but we are where we are. We are at level one.”
Talking about transformation won’t get us to level two. That will take co-ordinated; specific action championed from the very top of the governance structure.

The Prime Minister has already, in the wake of last week’s vaccination collapse, acknowledged his role as primus inter pares and stepped up to take the blame for that debacle.

Will he also take responsibility for the collective and comprehensive failures of digital transformation, more than a year into the challenge that covid19 offered this country’s public sector ICT capacity?