This talk is an overview of the Trinidad and Tobago experience in Whole of Government approaches. Overview of country e-governance framework Overview of the TTBizLink initiative Overview of the TTBizLink infrastructure Experiences on solutions to problems in e-Government in Infrastructure
To enrich the capacity building workshops and share your experiences on new innovations, trends, emerging issues and solutions to common governance challenges. Speaking time is 12- 15 mins max Number of slides is 10 - 15
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All protocols being observed, good afternoon everyone. The title of my presentation is whole of government approaches best practices - The Trinidad and Tobago experience.
One caveat of course is that I am sharing what we in Trinidad and Tobago have have success in doing. I wouldn't call it best practices but simply practices.
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Andre Dickson, I'm a system engineer with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Investment. My boss tells me that I'm pessimistic....which is mostly true. However I happen to be very optimistic about the impact that technology, especially at the scale of the Internet can have on society. Especially my own.
Which happens to be Trinidad and Tobago. So for those of you don't know, we are a twin island republic in the Caribbean, we have a population of 1.3 million people. Trinidad is where most of our industry is, such as energy and manufacturing while Tobago is paradise for tourists. We have a pretty developed oil and gas industry, a top exporter of LNG in the world with significant exports to the US. A recent Gallup poll named us the 5th happiest country in the world.
What am I going to cover in this presentation?
I'll be focusing on infrastructure but I'll tell a story of how Trinidad and Tobago has implemented Whole of Government approaches through the TTBizLink initiative.
I'm going to give an overview of Trinidad and Tobago's implementation of e-government.
I'm going to drill down into the implementation of our winning initiative, TTBizLink.
I'm going to highlight what we have done to ensure that the delivery of services through TTBizLink took a whole of Government approach. I'll try as much as possible to frame these ideas in the context of issues highlighted in the UNPAN's 2012 e-government survey.
Let's start with e-Government
The National Coordinating Authority for e-government in Trinidad and Tobago is the National Informationan and Communication Technology (ICT) Company Ltd, or simply iGovTT. They are a state agency under the newly reconfigured Ministry of Science and Technology. They have moved about a bit, starting under the Ministry of Public Administration. They have an agenda to consolidate the ICT needs of the government, it's delivery it's management and operations.
One of their responsibilities is managing the gov.tt domain, which most Ministry websites are hosted on. It is also the home page for our e-government portal.
Their most important responsibility is driving the infrastructure of Trinidad and Tobago's e-government agenda. GovneTT is the Government Informaiton Infrastructure or backbone. Launched in 2005 it is a high speed WAN (wide area network) that connects about 500 government sites in T&T and hosts Government to Government applications such as GHRS for Human Resource system across govt and payroll. It allows across these sites Internet access, email services, remote access and of course it is also secure.
ttconnect is our citizen-centric e-government delivery agency, managed by iGovTT. They boast a multi channel service delivery strategy about 5 channels in use. Our latest estimates for persons using the internet is about 59.2%. So ttconnect has busess to reach rural areas, physical centres located around the country and a hotline to speak face to face to CSRs.
The gov.tt domain that I just mentioned redirects to ttconnect.gov.tt. This is the online channel for ttconnect and is mostly tier 1 on the web measure in that it provides information on government services.
Link to the thematic portal to the TTBizLink initiative.
Argue that ttconnect has offered at least one e-service, which is teh ttconnectID. ttconnectID is our national authentication framework, citizens can register online for a unique 13 digit id that will give them access to e-services administered by the government. To activate the ttconnectid we require persons to verify their identity at one of our ttconnect centres, by presenting themselves in person with two forms of ID.
To this day the only reason people sign up for a ttconnectID is to use TTBizLink. So let me now tell you more about this initative.
This is our website ttbizlink.gov.tt.
What is it? TTBizLink is a Single Electronic Window, it's an online platform for delivering business related government services online. For those who are not familiar the Single Window is an internationally agreed upon convention for simplifying access to trade servicces. Governments are encouraged to make available all trade related services via a single portal, a one stop shop for traders, manufacturers and exporters to get licences and permits to do business.
We partnered with Crimsonlogic, a company in Singapore that was largely responsible for the first SEW system, TradeNet. They have been our implementation agency, responsible for both hardware and software design and implementation for the system.
So as I just mentioned, Single Windows are commonly deployed for trade facilitation.
TTBizLink is different in that we have used this platform to advance an additional agenda. TTBizLink is a trade and business facilitation platform. So not only can stakeolders in trade related services benefit from our e-services, general industry persons can also do so as we offer business registration and company incorporation as well. And also Work Permits which is a major demand for the companies in our Energy industry.
So our tagline is Business Made Easy. THe problem we faced with achieving ease of doing business as the MTII is that we don't have control over the services that affect business on a day to day basis. Customs, Permits, Licences, Business Registration, Work Permits none of it was controlled directly by my Ministry.
So what did we do? We partnered, you can call it GGP, we reached out to the Ministries in charge of these services and we offerred to bring them on to our platform, giving them an e-service, that would bring their services online for free. But TTBizLink doesn't just digitize services, through BPR we try to engage these Ministries and agencies to reform their procedures to make it more efficient. So we not only make the services easier to access, but users get business done in a far shorter time frame.
We currently have over 20 e-services online, over 6 applications. We launched over a year ago and we have over 1000 users and we process 1000s of transactions.
So let me get back to our infrastructure
Replicated network components for automatic failover
Secure infrastructure, levels of firewalss and Intrusion Detection systems. Also soft security procedures like auditing and physical access restrictions
1.3 TB of storage availabel to applications
Backups schedule for 7 year archival of data
Staging environment for testing and training purposes
Infrastructure is managed byb our data center owners, Fujitsu
Highlights of our system that are relevant to the Whole of government strategy
Backbone usage
What has come out of this project is that the MTII, especially the TTBizLink department has developed the capacity that our NCA lacks, which is to develop and deploy e-services. Through a non-competing, non-siloed fashion.
We use ttconnectID to authenticate our users, we didn't rebuild authentication. We had to make a slight tweak to allow for business entitites to create single profile so they can share data across their users, authenticate users for different services.
All permits and licences are secured with 3 security features and it is the same across all teh services. encrypted bar codes, watermarks and microprints.
The MTII procures similar hardware for all the agencies. So everything they use is compliant.
Some e-services interface with multiple agencies, eg. Work KPermits, so what we have is a clear agency owner who authorizes access to their systems by partnering agencies. THish should proobably say access instead of exchange, which is one way of negating the need for forwarding of information between agencies, just maintain one data store.
We can be described as a poduct agency, and in designing products for . We have embarked upon standardising a library of patterns for certain problems that we meet across services. Ministries and agencies can benefit from each other's procedural efficiencies.
I like to call this a system wide feedback cycle.
The central theme of our strategy is centralization.
How can governments use ICT to reduce the “burden of proof” to implement online ID services? How do we make registering and authenticating users a easier and more friction-less process while ensuring that there are robust authentication and authorization procedures.
How can government maintain efficiency across multichannel service delivery? With the backend efficiencies gained from e-service delivery, governments may find themselves questioning the need for traditional manual service delivery from a sustainable development perspective.Deploying online service delivery while maintaining a traditional service delivery can increase the operational resources needed to manage services. This tension is particularly acute in countries with low infrastructure capacity, what can governments around the world do from an infrastructure perspective to drive sustainable development on the backend across multichannel service delivery.