We had a minute to sit back and think about what has taken place over the last two years with this COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of things we felt could not be done electronically or remotely is being done. All of those meetings you had to go in for, no longer require a physical presence. Are Caribbean folks ready to accept not breathing down one another’s necks to get work done? They had better be.
I just saw a report from the IMF that analysed sectors in the Caribbean on their availability for the work to be done by robots. Though not exactly digital, it just goes to show you how the rest of the world is thinking and moving ahead.
Of course, there will never be a virtual vacation that any Caribbean hotelier would like, but services like booking your flight obviously, to reviewing past performance of your resort of island of choice all can be done online now. You don’t need a magazine or physical brochure in order to appreciate a destination.
More importantly the digital transformation is happening in the way we do business. If you didn’t have an online presence at the start of the COVID-19 shutdowns, you sure as hell got one during or when the lockdowns had a break. If you still don’t, then what a fool you are.
But even as I say that there is data suggesting that even with firms with an online presence, many of our Caribbean and Central American folks don’t engage them or don’t have the tools or don’t trust the tools to engage them. Many don’t even had a bank account, let alone a debit card to purchase things online. The commercial banks are just now trying to fast track e-commerce solutions across the region, some with better success than others.
Then now with the clear need for an online presence and mode of doing business, we have to worry about the integrity of the telecommunications infrastructure. Hackers, spyware, malware and the like are not the thing to be very careful about more so than a terrorist strapping a bomb to themselves and blowing up parliament. Just last week a hacker group held Apple data hostage and was asking for an insane amount of money, to the tune of millions of dollars from Apple. Data being held hostage can happen to any one of our ministries or large businesses. So, are we ready to maintain this new thrust?
The early returns suggest that we are not that bad, but we are woefully behind. We need to catch up to 20 years of established digital advancement in developed countries and catch up in 3 years in order just to get up to speed. Then we have to keep up.
We have work to do.