Tirade on systems

Written by Carol Lawton

Policy is the domain of the technocrat who studied a field, thinks himself/ herself an expert and now hold a job in government either by the civil service or through political alliances. In policy development there lies a development process to implementation. These are define problems and solutions, funding, time, communication to the public, implementation, follow through by education,feedback and redevelopment of policy. Without policy no organization can exist as it is the blue print to the end game of an objective.

Normally most will start a discussion on policy based upon development but I will going backwards in regards to Jamaica . Lets stop trying to reinvent the wheel. There are numerous countries, we can study before push a policy so we can look at their blue print and the end result to see if the end result was as intended and why it worked or did not work thus putting in place controls to mitigate failures or enhance success of the system. As with all things foreign, we can just take theirs and not tailor it to our unique situations and culture which will lead to absolute failure. To live another countries tradition is a sure path to the destruction of a generation has it confuses the youth. Creolization of the first world system can be achieved without corrupting the system and making it an exercise in futility. Prime example is the TRN. The system would not be accepted in Jamaica with open arms therefore it should have targeted the soft spots to gain reach within the population instead the TRN system was made into a revenue collector and not a tool for policy. Systems make first world. Systems are tools for efficiency and decision making. It achieved few of its potential goals. Mr. Shaw in order for you to fix this mess you need to revisit the application of the TRN as current policy for a credit system will be ineffective without a change in the law and the system.

The Jamaica Labour Party Finance Minister is slated to launch a credit system. But the previous policy had flaws hence if he goes ahead without correcting the key field in this base system, he will created a retarded bastard. Its bad to bastardize a system but to further retard it will be a crime against the citizens considering we all know better. I am for the credit system , in fact wish it had come 10 years ago. This system if properly implement will merge Jamaica’s citizens into the financial capital system of a global economy thus diversifying the products and services offer in the financial sector. It is one of the last things to this first world plan which they say is so far away.

Due to the fact that this system and policy is already in place, we have feedback, we have follow through data to review before moving forward hence clean wiser decision can be made. All this may seem confusing but the end has to be the beginning of Mr. Shaw’s move to implement this new system as one government must build on the other and not start over from the block position as it is too expense to learn as we go. We have been here before lessons learn. Its costly to the tax payer.

The critical element here is will the soft targets be cleaned up in this existing TRN system to enable the more complex subsystem of a credit reporting system to be overlaid on it. All this may sound vague, confused and illogical but call a chicken a chicken and a duck a duck. If the unique key is correct through out the system and controls are in place in the place in the form of laws to protect identity then this credit system should be a 123 implementation if Mr. Shaws using the 3 major collectors of this data like Experian.

They already control North America, South America, Europe and Asia so lets not redevelop a system that can not be integrated into the global system. The development time to completion time would be months vs years. So first world status is not 20 years away its months if we make the decision to fix our policy systems vs making over and building on the mistakes of the past vs the success of the pass and the present. I will not say future because policy takes about 8 years to see the effects and fix it. That was the critical failure of the PNP. They failed to look at the feedback and fix the problems but kept adding to the system. Hopefully the JLP will look at these systems before they proceed to see where they fit into their plans as one failed base system will exponential cause critical failures across all subsystems.