The Tribune

THE Government’s digital transformation initiative requires public officials to “un-think” their traditional approach to serving the Bahamian people, a Cabinet minister has said.

Senator Kwasi Thompson, minister of state for Grand Bahama, who is also responsible for electronic communications and the Government’s digitisation programme, laid out The Bahamas’ progress and future plans at Red GEALC’s sixth ministerial meeting of digital government.

The virtual conference, held from November 18-20, brought together information and communications technology (ICT) ministers from the Caribbean and Latin America. Red GEALC stands for The network of e-Government leaders of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Mr Thompson, in his presentation, said The Bahamas’ move towards e-government and the digital delivery of services was designed to foster transparency, effectiveness, efficiency and cost reductions.

“We focused on streamlining to reduce or remove the movement of paper or documents between customer and government, and agency-to-agency to reduce or remove the need for the public officer to review and approve where it adds no value,” said Mr Thompson.

“Our challenge was to get public officers to ‘un-think’ how things are done and to ‘rethink’ a better way for themselves and their customers. Our Bahamas Electronic Cabinet Management Information System (BECMIS) is a good example of our ‘focused’ approach. It is a six-month project with releases in six-week intervals.

“Users, from clerks in the Cabinet Office to my Cabinet colleagues, are involved from the design to testing. We are successfully battling through the elimination of steps, the rethinking process flow, and redesigning documents. When completed, there will be end-to-end handling of information and proceedings electronically. We will see digital collaboration between agencies and collaboration between Cabinet colleagues.”

Mr Thompson said The Bahamas was excited about its Proof of Concept (POC) Interoperability Platform, which is currently in beta test mode. This platform, he added, will allow government services to share information from different data sources securely.

“Due to built-in verifications and validations, the user provides little to no information for renewal services and, in most instances, public officers will only have to review and approve requests or transactions that are an exception,” explained Mr Thompson.

“To reach this level of automation the IT agency worked closely with the service provider to streamline processes, engaging them from design to testing. The platform in its POC stage will allow for renewal of driver’s licenses, renewal of passports, a request for the customer’s own birth certificate or marriage certificate.

“Also in pilot mode is the launch of the Sand Dollar, The Bahamas’ digital currency. The Central Bank in partnership with authorised payment service providers reaches the banked and the unbanked. The Government has also put forward the Digital Assets and Registered Exchanges Bill 2020 (DARE) aimed at establishing the framework for regulation of the issuance, sale and trade of digital assets in and from within The Bahamas.”

Mr Thompson said that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, agencies have accelerated their digital programmes, including the Food Assistance programme, the Bahamas Feeding Network and virtual schools. Parks and public spaces are being equipped to provide Internet access.

He added that through all these ICT initiatives there was a strong realisation within the Government of the need for growing capacity in specialised fields such as application development and IT operations, but also in business analysis, change management, procurement and public relations.