Above: Minister of Digital Transformation Hassel Bacchus. Photo courtesy the Ministry of Digital Transformation.

BitDepth#1494 for January 20, 2025

Last week’s column was described by a reader as “uncharitable.” Which is correct, in a strict reading of its intent. It offered no gifts and cut no slack.

The national effort to effect tangible digital transformation is critically important and merits continuous evaluation. While blunt assessment has its place, so too does unsolicited advice.

The plans of the Ministry of Digital Transformation (MDT) are neither misguided nor inappropriate, but their ambitions so robustly exceed our lived reality that a clearer effort to harness strategy to more clearly stated tactics is needed.

Leadership. Hassel Bacchus is the Digital Transformation Minister, but the government is led by the Prime Minister and, in some shadow role, the Prime Minister in Waiting.

Bacchus is guided by collective consensus, so if the goals of the government must be set by the PM and PMiW, and the compass there has not been clearly set to a digital future.

The father of PMiW and current Minister of Many Things, Stuart Young has been a robust and vigorous advocate of greater emphasis on fintech for years now, but even that paternal influence hasn’t helped.

To be fair, digital is a tough conceptual sell for politicians. Launches of things on screens aren’t terribly exciting and digital ribbon cuttings are inevitably a farce.

Greater state efficiency is also the nemesis of political patronage. It demands a more refined skillset from public servants, who will, in turn be empowered by technology to do more, reducing staffing requirements.

The public sector is the largest single employer in TT, so signals of potential technology-fueled reductions in state employment are not a rallying cry for the political faithful.

Improvements in service will follow and please the public, but not before creating significant issues within the public service.

Dr Williams’ decision to own some of the downstream opportunities of raw oil and natural gas with an industrial estate was a major government intervention in the extraction process.

Dr Williams was not a technocrat, but he trusted one, Dr Ken Julien, and gave him the force of his good right hand in executing an expensive and dramatic change in the way the country’s patrimony was managed.

The Point Lisas Industrial Estate was created by a cadre of world-class scientists, analysts and engineers, not politicians.

Over the next few months, there will be a new Prime Minister and that leader cannot simply hope that digital transformation will emerge from the existing morass of muddled thinking and partial executions.

Oversight. The MDT’s role, as with all ministries, is to set policy and evaluate the execution of the public service.

But its role must move beyond that for successful transformation.
Government ministries operate as siloed operations, erecting Chinese walls to “own” their projects and achievements.

There are three stages to digital transformation and Trinidad and Tobago continues to struggle with the first two, digitization (transforming analog resources into digital) and digitalization, the conversion of analog-based processes to digital systems.

Every playbook for digital transformation in governance emphases the need for stakeholder buy-in and participation, but local instances of this are invisible, if they exist.

Is there a digital transformation unit in every government ministry? An evangelizing group dedicated to identifying opportunities for transformation and capable of moving actionable projects to completion?

The MDT cannot mobilize enough people to move the corpus of government forward on its own.

What’s needed are native evangelists within every ministry, not imported sermons from the MDT.

Hassel Bacchus talks about his ministry’s plan to leapfrog to greater transformation, but what’s needed is a multitude of small steps that demonstrate the value of transformation to public sector stakeholders and the general public.

The MDT’s goals won’t be won with the force of a single tsunami, but with a steady rhythm of wave surges, each rolling ashore successfully.

Effective teams. The MDT was built from scratch four years ago. Some staff were imported from existing ministries but many are new to the governance process.
If you are a young hire at the MDT, this bit is for you.

First up, you cannot win.
In government, politics and its related skill, longevity, trump actual technical knowledge every time.

You have a choice. You can become political and play the game as defined, you can leave and find merit-based employment in the private sector, or you can learn the fine art of bureaucratic jiu jitsu and find ways to make the system work for you.

As a recent hire, you are likely to be the first to go in any downsizing anyway and you are probably on one of those ridiculous contracts used to bypass the problems associated with full-time government employment.

You are probably working with some of those problems, but every problem holds the seeds of its solution and every experience, no matter how dire, is an education.

So document, document, document. Write down every commitment, decision, agreement, and promise. Follow everything up in writing. Use the aide mémoire like a rapier.

Very politely and in measured language, make your voice and suggestions heard. If your bosses co-opt your ideas, feed them more regularly and industriously. You will have more ideas.

Digitalize by example. You can talk about digital transformation for years on end and get nowhere. Show what happens.

Pick the low hanging fruit and execute mercilessly on each to deliver a process that works and delivers value.

When I began writing this column in 1995, I made a pact to never deliver it as text on paper, the way I’d delivered my writing for publication over the previous 20 years. At first, I brought the column in on a floppy disk, but I never reneged on that promise to remain digital.

Until 2004, I’d photographed Carnival on transparency film for 25 years. That year, I shot on digital after testing the medium over the previous three years. The pictures that resulted were only marginally acceptable, but within two years, I’d achieved parity with film.

To transform, you have to do it, make the mistakes, wheel and come again.