Fix it before you speed it up — choosing the first thing to automate, and the data work that comes first

Last week, Barbados’s Senior Minister Kerrie Symmonds put some numbers to something anyone who works with small businesses in this region already suspected. Across the Caribbean, only 4 to 5 per cent of business transactions are conducted digitally, against 18 to 19 per cent in the United States. Citing research commissioned by that country’s Small Business Association, he noted that among Barbadian micro, small and medium enterprises, 78 per cent use social media and customer-facing platforms. Only 13 per cent use payroll software. Only 14 per cent use digitised inventory management. A quarter use no digital management tools at all.

Read those last four numbers together and a pattern appears. We have automated the shop window. The stock room, the payroll and the ledger are still being run by hand.

Jamaica’s picture rhymes. A Mastercard study reported in May found that only 8 per cent of small merchants use point-of-sale systems, and that cash still accounts for roughly 72 per cent of personal consumption spending. Set that against the roughly 422,000 registered micro, small and medium enterprises the Ministry of Finance and the Small Business Association of Jamaica count in this country, and the scale of the gap becomes clear.