Let us introduce ourselves and give you some background on what we’ll do here.

Michele

An experienced Consultant, Manager, Regulator, Engineer and Author, Michele Marius has over 20 years of experience in the ICT and telecommunications space. She has worked in both the private and public sectors and in developed and developing countries in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

Currently, Michele is the Director of ICT Pulse Consulting Limited, a research and advisory firm specialising in a broad range of ICT and telecommunications issues, and is based in Jamaica. She is also the Founder of Project Calls, an online platform collating tender opportunities across the Caribbean region.

Finally, Michele is the Publisher, Editor and Primary Contributor of ICT Pulse. This well-respected and longstanding online publication discusses topical telecommunications and ICT issues from a Caribbean perspective, with a wide readership across the region and internationally. She also hosts the ICT Pulse Podcast, through which to deep dive into important ICT/technology issues occurring in the Caribbean, thus enriching the conversation we, in the region, could be having.

Matthew

I’m Matthew Cowen, and I have been working in the IT industry in one form or another for around 30 years and have lived in the Caribbean for over 18 years. Lately, I’ve been concentrating on the digital ecosystems of the Caribbean and written reports analysing diverse topics such as infrastructure, cybersecurity, and the ICT market in the Caribbean. Those reports have gone to Governments, NGOs, businesses and individuals looking to invest/set up businesses that relate to tech.

Our proposition

A couple of years ago, we spoke together and came to the same conclusion by experience and observation. Research reports in the Caribbean are basically… broken. We don’t mean they are useless or shouldn’t exist. Of course not! We’ve both contributed to them and will continue to do so.

What we mean by “broken” is that they target those that can afford to commission them and are then accessible to a relatively small population of the Caribbean: large businesses, governments, etc. The everyday businessman, small business, startup, and burgeoning entrepreneur are all essentially excluded. When they get their hands on these reports, they’re out of date or irrelevant. So often, we’ve seen reports with titles that include “Latin America and the Caribbean” when a simple search in the pdf reveals nothing about the Caribbean. We know it’s not the researcher’s or writer’s fault; the data is often not there or is so poor that making sense of it is difficult.

We’re victims of it in our work, too!

Let’s look at a couple of data points. Approximately 95% of all businesses in the region are MSMEs. They account for approximately 60% of employment but only around a quarter of GDP. That means those who most need access to the information contained in these reports are the ones least likely to be able to afford to commission them, let alone wait for 9 to 18 months before they are available.

These reports take months to write, design, approve, and release. They are out of date before you can download them, and this is only getting worse as change accelerates. As Heraticlus said, “Change is the only constant in life.” Our world is accelerating and no longer moving at an easily understood pace.

Reports tend to be too specific in scope, answering specific or closed questions that are gold for the requesting party but virtually useless for the rest of us. However, people are more connected than ever —for good or for bad— which puts pressure on the information cycle to be faster, not necessarily better. People are generally more connected and follow along near real-time, rendering traditional reporting irrelevant. Astonishingly, around 5 billion people use some form of Social Media.

When you look at “digital”, it used to mean IT or IT-related. It was vertical. It was siloed. It was the computer department’s problem. That couldn’t be further from the truth in 2025. As digital transformation takes root and the digitalisation of everything is more commonplace, “digital” is horizontal, transversal, and touches everything. And we mean EVERYTHING!

Too much information is online, and more are generated as you read this. The amount produced by humans already connected to the internet is staggering —around 50% of the population. DOMO estimated that by 2020, every human connected to the internet would generate, on average, 1.7MB of data every second. Our World in Data estimated that there would be 3.4 billion internet users in 2016, and more recent estimates place that number at approximately 5 billion people.

Having access to this much information is not always a good thing. Having little or no experience with much of this data, having little inclination to understand deeply, or, as is more likely, having no time to distil and process it, makes it difficult for businesses to make better and informed decisions. It is harder and harder to navigate the information high seas.

We’re trying to fix this. Let us explain.

We promise to provide research briefs that are both dynamic and timely. Dynamic because data changes as our understanding changes; it’ll be integrated into our reports. Timely, because fast access to these changes is key to keeping up with the world.

We’re promising to provide open-ended reports that try to answer broader questions and dig into the specifics of a particular topic. We’ll distil the information into manageable parts without forgetting the wider context. We’ll help you understand the pressing practical questions of today and provide insight into the bigger picture. We’ll even recommend actions you can take now or in the future.

We promise not to shy away from the Caribbean context, regardless of how difficult it is to obtain data and reliable information. We promise to fix that as much as possible by providing access to first-party data as we collect and generate it. Please give us a little space, as that takes time and requires your participation.

To do this, we’re launching the Caribbean Digital Compass.

The compass is one of the most useful tools ever invented for navigating the globe’s rocks and shores. Without it, many sailors would have been shipwrecked or sunk into the sea over the rocks they were trying to avoid.

Our compass is digital and aligned to the Caribbean context without ignoring the rest of the world’s effect on us.

We hope the Caribbean Digital Compass will become part of your arsenal of tools for driving your business and yourself forward in your digital ecosystem.

We promise to provide you with briefs that are as factual as they are helpful and digestible. Gone are the days when business leaders like you could plough through 300-page essays written in a dry tone.

We plan to produce reports on individual countries over the coming weeks and months. This will set the context and give you an invaluable resource to understand “digital” in the Caribbean country-by-country. We’ll start with the larger markets and add the others as we progress.

However, that is not all. Once this process has started and is progressing well, we’ll begin to introduce topics of research that require a deeper dive, producing deeply researched information as it becomes available. Examples of these reports would be cybersecurity (possibly the most pressing issue for the world aside from climate change), digital health in the Caribbean, or Artificial Intelligence.

We hope you’ll join us in this journey, and we hope you’ll get involved in the discussion. As more of us join, our collective knowledge can only increase, helping you and the others around you.

We hope to provide you with something affordable, unique, accessible, and enduring value. We plan to expand our offerings and services later, too.

Why not drop us a note (reply to this email or comment directly on the website) with your thoughts, aspirations, and anything you’d like us to research? This is for you!

Thank you, and we look forward to serving you.