Above: Illustration by Funtap/DepositPhotos

BitDepth#1310 for July 15, 2021

On Monday, the Prime Minister announced the reassignment of Alyson West as Minister of Public Transformation and the appointment of a new Minister of Digital Transformation (MODT), Hassel Bacchus.

Bacchus was appointed to the renamed Ministry of Public Transformation in August 2020 in a nod to the pressing demands on the government to respond to the reality facing the country under covid19 restrictions.

It was a notable amplification of the government’s lip-service to digitalization of its governance processes but seems to have yielded little after a year.

Minister Bacchus will now preside over an arm of government at least nominally tasked with digital transformation.
While the minister will have his own plans, there are some generalities that will clearly demand his attention and require very specific staff dedicated to a range of projects that will now fall under his ministry.

The first task will be to establish clear lines of authority and responsibility.

The MODT will face some specific challenges in articulating its role among the crowd of formal ministries, state agencies and quasi-government agencies that constitute the pervasive presence of the state in TT.

The emasculating experience of iGovTT, which was born as a transformation agency and ended up being a eunuch timidly offering up ideas and advice, is a template for how a good idea can go horribly wrong.

The government can ill-afford to take years or even months crafting and refining the laws and regulations that would adequately empower the operations of the new ministry.

If Hassel Bacchus has used his first year on the job wisely, he would have crafted the frameworks that this new ministry needs to do its work.
The arm of governance will also need cash to do its work. A lot of it.

Money to evaluate existing infrastructure, to pay developers to craft and deploy solutions that unify government operations that currently operate in madcap silos of software architecture.

The new minister should push for a big up-front investment in developers to design and iterate an open-source framework it will own and refine based on established best practices in digital governance.

That’s only part of the human resources problem that Bacchus will face.
According to the Central Statistical Office’s most recent tabulation of employment recording the fourth quarter of 2019, the government employs 33.3 per cent of the workforce in TT.

In addition to technocrats, the new ministry will need to create a staff profile that mixes technical expertise with bureaucratic navigation skills.
The new ministry will get exactly nowhere with a slate of new broom hires.

It will need to build out a team of experienced civil servants capable of navigating the considerable bureaucracy and entrenched perspectives that characterise the public service.

If the MODT isn’t forced to take people from Public Administration or to inherit legacy appointments, Bacchus will need to cherry pick existing civil servants suitable for unification roles in the MODT.

The people that the MODT needs will need to be culled from a very specific profile of talent and experience and will benefit from low staff numbers operating with a high skill level, the exact opposite of traditional government hiring practice.

And that’s before the Public Service Association begins to respond to plans that will inevitably bring significant changes to the employment status of the 80,000 workers they represent.

There were two chances for the government to drive an incremental evolution of the public service to a digitally enabled environment.

Both were planned in exhaustive detail then collapsed as inertia ground Fast Forward into reverse gear.
The 2021 mission will take money, a cadre of skilled experts, a clear strategic plan and the unequivocal, clearly stated advocacy of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet.

Is there enough money to make a true Ministry of Digital Transformation? Enough talent to make these projects happen?

Sufficient steely will to overturn an organisational architecture designed to create a constituency of the gratefully over-employed?

In 2018, former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik, in an interview with the IMF’s Finance and Development publication summarised his country’s success with digital governance.

“It’s not the technology. It’s political will, policy, laws and regulations, in that order,” he said.
“In order for it to work, you need laws that underpin the system. You want to define digital identity, then set out the regulations to avoid abuses. And in Estonia that has worked.