: Since the early 1980s, I worked for the UK Government on a variety of issues concerning Information Technology (IT) and the Internet. Just prior to coming out to Bermuda in 2001, I worked as the head of the e-business division at the Confederation of British Industry which is the main business trade association in the UK.

In July 2001 I came out here to be the e-commerce consultant to the Ministry of Telecommunications & E-Commerce which is now the Ministry of Tourism, Telecommunications & E-Commerce.

I work in the E-Commerce Department. At the moment there's only me (laugh), but it's certainly not a lonely existence. We do a variety of things. Clearly we're developing policies, we're developing legislation, we're developing plans to implement the Green Paper.

I'm involved in the new Government portal which will be going live towards the end of March. We're involved in marketing Bermuda on the international stage. I travel with the Minister (Ren?e Webb) and support her in talking up the business opportunities to come and invest in Bermuda.

She's a tremendous advocate for Bermuda. She talks just as well to business audiences as she does to tourism audiences. I find my days are very full.

I'm just a civil servant. I took a degree in electronic engineering many years ago, so I suppose I have some background in the technical issues, but primarily my interest and my involvement in e-commerce was gained through my work for the Department of Trade & Industry in the UK.

We saw clearly, in the early 1990s, that e-commerce and the Internet were going to be forces which completely transformed society. In the Department of Trade & Industry, we were primarily concerned with the change to business, but also (the change to) people in all walks of life.

We saw that it was going to be tremendously important for people ? that the Internet was going to change people's lives. We weren't visionaries. We were just looking at what was going on in society and I suppose from that ? trying to persuade countries or governments that they needed to take the Internet and e-commerce seriously ? (we determined) that policies and legislation had to be developed and that if we were going to exploit it to its full capacity, we needed to do some thinking.

I'm sure that any economy in terms of the breadth of international companies it has, needs to try and diversify as much as possible. But what we want to say first and foremost about e-business, is that e-business is not a market sector in its own right.

You go down the road and see restaurants, hotels, you see clothes' shops and newsagents. You don't see e-commerce shops. You don't come across e-commerce providers. e-commerce is a way of doing business. It's true we have Internet service providers and they're, if you like, e-commerce providers in their own sense.

We have telecommunications companies. We have IT companies on the island and they're all involved in e-commerce; they're all involved in e-business. E-business is something that all companies do. Any company that establishes itself in Bermuda, part of our (purpose) in the Department of E-Commerce is to try and convince them ? if they need convincing ? that adopting e-business and e-commerce techniques is going to be beneficial for their own business.

In that same way, we're convincing schools. We're convincing Government. We're convincing a whole range of the public sector that doing things the e-business way is efficient, is better for the customers, and is better for the country generally.

As it applies to schools, there are two ways they are adopting technology and are using e-business technologies. Every single classroom in every public school has now been wired with the Internet. This means that pupils (of all ages), no matter what the lesson, can go online and access information from the Internet.

That's a direct way that the Internet in schools can help the learning process. Years back, when I went to school . . . how would we find out information? We'd either go to the school library or have to go to the public library after school.

It's also vitally important that the children of today come out of school understanding technology. They don't need to be technical experts, IT experts, but we need them to be technically literate so that whether in a bank, reinsurance company or with Government, they can sit in front of a screen and operate. That's the difference it's making in schools. In Government and business it's also making a tremendous difference.

Ten or 15 years ago, all submissions to Cabinet Ministers would have been done in longhand on pieces of paper. Ministers didn't have e-mail. Now Cabinet submissions are transferred by e-mail. Ministers walk around with their blackberries ? hand-held devices where they can check their e-mail on a constant basis and send e-mails to each other.

At the end of next month, we're introducing a new Government portal. Whatever you want to know about any department of the Bermuda Government will be on the portal. Information about what that department does, how that department can help a system or help a business, will all be on this one source ? www.gov.bm.

At the moment if you want to find out information about Government you have to go to the Transport Control Department site or the Immigration site. In the future, anyone who wants to know anything about Government in Bermuda will go to this one site. It should be a tremendous help to people. Not so much for people who have grown up in Bermuda all their lives, but for visitors to the island, potential business people, expats who are coming to live.

I see the role of the E-Commerce Department in two fundamental areas. The first is to try and get businesses to come to Bermuda. Bermuda is an excellent location for international businesses to come and have their base.

You've seen what's happened in reinsurance. You've seen what's happened in financial services. That's why we think businesses that want to have a base in Bermuda locate their business infrastructure here.

Whether their business infrastructure is in terms of a web site where they sell CDs or whether it's a web site where they procure goods for their company or they do their human relations or they do their customer relations management, whatever.

But we think Bermuda is an excellent place for people to put their e-businesses. It's a secure place. We have excellent political and economic stability. We've got good hosting companies. We've got excellent telecommunications companies.

That's the first part of the equation and Aardvark Communications and Troncossi Public Relations are our marketing agents in that, promoting Bermuda as an e-business jurisdiction to come and try and get firms to locate here.

The second part of the equation ? which I mentioned earlier ? is to try and get everyone on the island to use e-business. It's a tremendous tool; a tool that will make our companies more efficient, make them more competitive and will make Government much more friendly to its customers and to business as well.

At the moment we're conducting an e-business survey, asking businesses how they're using e-business. Do they just have a web site? Do they just have Internet? Do they take orders electronically? Do they contact their customers, their suppliers electronically? What do they do in this e-business world? How e-business aware are they? What have they done in e-business?

And then we're always asking them what the barriers are to the adoption of e-business and what the opportunities they perceive are as well.

We learned that Bermuda's a pretty switched-on place. A certain amount of cynicism often occurs with e-business. If you go back to 1998, 1999, the Internet was seen as a revolutionary force. All these dot.com companies started up. An awful lot of companies started up selling things over the Internet.

People thought they could do anything. As you know, these dot.com companies raised a lot of money. For a while they were the heroes of the stock exchange; the transforming force for society. And then suddenly, the bubble burst, and a lot of them went broke.

The whole atmosphere of optimism about what the Internet could do for the world was replaced with a lot of cynicism, if you like. Even some commentators said the Internet's gone. It was just a passing phase like Pok?mon or something like that.

Whereas, really what was happening ? and this was what the 2002 survey found in Bermuda ? was that businesses, whether they be hotels, whether they be restaurants, food retailers, car shops, a lot of these businesses were using e-business techniques to make their business more efficient.

They weren't making a lot of noise about it, but slowly businesses were putting out web sites ? the Goslings, the Bacardis ? and taking orders over those web sites. The 2002 survey was a very optimistic survey and we were very pleased with the response. People did indicate problems ? the cost of telecommunications, the cost of using the Internet was a problem. Some people felt that the right advice wasn't available within the community. It was a very useful report. And what we're doing now is going back to see how the picture's changed. Obviously we hope that the picture's got even better.

That's absolute nonsense. E-commerce is an evolutionary force. I'm not pretending that the Government can solve all the e-commerce problems or that Government on its own can force the pace of this revolution.

What it needs is a corroboration between Government and the private sector. At the end of the day, private sector will drive e-business but the Government has got a real role to play. Look at the European Union. Look at the United States. Look at Japan. Look at Malaysia. Look at Singapore. Look at Dublin. Look at the Bahamas. Look at Cayman. Look at all our competitors and they all have institutions of Government that are promoting e-business and e-commerce.

Government still has a lot to do. Government still has a role to play. Not in rigging the market. Not in subsidising the market in any way, but in promoting the market; talking to businesses. Doing things like e-business surveys. Doing awareness events. Making sure the right policies and the right legislation is in place.

As you may know we recently came out with a consultation document on data protection. We haven't got any wide-scale data protection at the moment and that's something that might well help the development of e-commerce.

That's something we're looking at introducing. We just introduced legislation on copyright that will help the development of e-commerce. So there's a number of things that Government still has to do. We need to be involved.

We published the Green Paper on E-Business in May last year. (It) sets out the strategy of where Bermuda wants to be on e-business (and includes) two fundamental thrusts. We want e-businesses to invest in Bermuda; to locate their e-business technologies and their e-business infrastructure in Bermuda.

But at the same time, we want to use e-business as a force of good for the people of Bermuda. Schoolchildren, patients, seniors, we want to see e-business helping everyone in Bermuda in whatever they do. In terms of a timeframe, the e-business paper spelled out a number of goals in terms of time we'd like to do things.

Clearly, we'd hope that within the next two to three years, we would see a gradual increase in the number of companies locating their e-business infrastructure in Bermuda. In the last two or three years already, we've seen an increase in the connectivity to the Internet from about 60 per cent to about 71 per cent.

More than 71 per cent of residential homes have the Internet connection. We have the ability to get broadband connections to about 94 per cent of homes within Bermuda, which is a tremendous opportunity.

So things are really happening in Bermuda. We have tremendous technology companies. Our telecommunication companies are competitive and providing great services to the public and to business. It's an evolution. It goes on.

I'm sure Trevor Moniz is right. At some stage, perhaps ten years in the future, Government won't necessarily be involved in this at all. It will be just like running a sweet shop or a garage, everyone will be doing it. But during this transition period, Government clearly has a role in trying to help businesses adapt to this new way of doing business.