Complementing the island’s existing advantages (its legal and regulatory framework, financial and tax structures, quality of life and living standards) Jersey is making progress in many of these areas. The launch this year of the Digital Jersey Hub is an excellent example; contributing to the island’s digital infrastructure, creating a centre and focus for Jersey’s digital activities and building a community. Now home for over 80 individual and business residents, the Hub provides co-working space for start-ups and a growing range of incubator services, training and development programmes, workshops and meet-ups.


The availability of technology skills in Jersey remains a pressing problem and there is a significant gap, both in terms of capability and capacity, to support growth in the digital sector. In the immediate term this gap is being met through inward migration, a controversial subject in a small island that wants to balance economic growth with a sustainable environment. Beyond this, the island is providing increased training programmes, including Digital Jersey’s own Coding Programme that graduates its first cohort in February next year. The 14 students come from a variety of backgrounds, few with existing technology skills, with age ranges from 19 to 43.


With good progress being made in many areas, Jersey’s digital ecosystem still has a long way to go; as with Rome, it will not be built in a day. Our international reputation in the digital arena remains small – conferences such as this year’s Island


Innovators have helped, when more than 120 participants from over 20 countries brought their knowledge, skills and relationships to Jersey for the first time. Additionally, while there are moves to improve the level of technology covered in the school curriculum, Jersey does not have a university, certainly not comparable to the institutions that play such a vital role in most tech centres, driving innovation and supplying new talent and business ideas.


As in all jurisdictions, the role of government is vital to Jersey’s digital future. It is critical that government ensures that it is easy to do business here, by minimising red tape and bureaucracy, provide much needed incentives to support growth and attract businesses and, most importantly of all, to deliver a vision for a digitally enabled island. In many of these areas Jersey is becoming less competitive - not because we are slipping backwards but because other countries are moving forward at speed. For example our traditional tax advantages are no longer as compelling, with other countries matching them and adding highly attractive direct incentives to attract companies to their shores. Similarly, visiting Estonia earlier this year demonstrated why this small country tops the league in the eGov stakes as they now provide more that 3000 services to citizens online, including the ability to register a new company in less than 20 minutes, a process that can take days or weeks in Jersey. The Estonian government estimates that the impact of these digital services has been to save each citizen two weeks per


A Digital Jersey Page 5


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