White Elephants Can't Dance

I took great interest in the budget presentation by the Barbados PM and Minister of Finance, David Thompson yesterday.

I was so excited I mocked PricewaterhouseCoopers and deduced the relevant concepts for tourism and these are currently being evaluated by key industry players. Two areas that I was disappointed in however, were the absence of government support for online business transactions that flow into the island and the seemingly lost cause of public sector reform.

Currently only outflows are allowed because the banks of Barbados are too averse to the inherent 'risk', largely due to the credit card stipulations that facilitate reimbursement of frustrated customers leaving the bank with the incurred charges. Or something like that.

With the traditional sectors, traded and non-traded showing such signs of tiredness and maturity-decline life cycle status, one would think government would seek to embrace the 21st century. Let's face the facts, the old business models are our problem. Only when this is made right can the competence of the employees be held up to scrutiny or else you risk praising someone for doing a good job at typewriting in the age of touchscreen technology.

Nevertheless, I was happy to see he mentioned the need for the tourism sector to use social media more creatively as it relates to our marketing campaigns. After Barrack Obama so successfully used the Internet to push his campaign for presidency in the USA, I think one would be hard pressed to hang on to the old adage that the web is for kids and has no strategic substance.

Whither Public Sector Reform?

I was also disappointed by the seemingly side-stepping approach to public sector reform, a concept that holds much rhetorical underpinnings of late. Certainly that department has gone under the visibility radar.

Productivity is such a huge issue in government and while the productivity council is doing a great job in this area, public sector reform is the only way to eliminate those systems or old world infrastructural mechanism and mindsets that prevent the Council's strategic of better performance management and reward strategies from being truly effective.

Elephants, big white, public sector elephants, have no choice today but to learn the dance of the learner, flexible, organically structured enterprises of post-1999. This is the new order qualifier if one is to attain true competitive advantage. Customers don't expect to do business with anyone post-1999 who refuses to refine their operations strategies and make them customer centred.

Why 1999? According to Moody's, that was the year when Barbados last peaked in their debt metrics rating at A-. We are now at BAA and trending downward. Meanwhile, public sector administrators continue to see information as power, iteration as the rule and place technicality of the tasks over productivity and staying within budget. Simply put, day-to-day activities are hardly held up to the scrutiny of corporate objectives or targets.

Who is going to be the one to say that in this recession non-traditional business sectors and cost savings must be the new sources of revenue generated? Who is going to spearhead the quantum leap that will take Barbados' government into the 21st century? Who will teach this elephant how to shake his booty to the tune of the new dynamic global economic dispensation? Who will guide him through these paradoxical crossroads of opportunity? Fate awaits.