A digital transformation guide for Anguilla government services

The .ai dividend is a software budget

Anguilla’s ccTLD became, through nobody’s planning, the address space of an entire industry. The revenue that follows is a matter of public record and has been reported repeatedly as a material share of government income. What matters for this guide is second-order: a small jurisdiction with an unusual revenue line can afford to build public services properly rather than cheaply.

Properly, here, does not mean expensively. It means once.

Do the form last

Every digitisation project we have seen fail started by rebuilding the form. A form is the easiest part and the least valuable: a PDF that became a web page is still a queue, still a person re-keying, still a filing cabinet with better fonts.

The order that works is: define the record, then the status, then the notification, then the form. Once a resident can see where their application is without telephoning, most of the department’s inbound calls stop — before a single form has changed.

Build for the phone on the ferry

Public services in a small island state are used on mobile data, often at the edge of coverage, often by somebody who will not get a second chance that day. That is an engineering constraint with real consequences: server-rendered pages over client-side frameworks, forms that survive a dropped connection, state that is never held only in a browser tab.

It is the same constraint we build FetePASS to, and the reason we build our own outdoor hotspot hardware rather than assuming coverage.

Accessibility and language are requirements, not a phase two

A public service has to work with a screen reader, at 200% zoom, and for somebody whose first language is not the one the form is written in. Retrofitting that costs more than building it in, every time. We test accessible names against rendered text rather than assuming a label is correct, because a control that reads differently to a voice-control user than it looks is a control that cannot be operated.

Common questions

Do you work with government departments?

We build for businesses and institutions across the Caribbean basin and we are based in the region. Any public-sector engagement would go through the relevant procurement process; nothing on this page describes an existing government contract.

Is a .ai domain hosted in Anguilla?

No. A .ai domain is a registration in Anguilla’s registry; the site behind it can be hosted anywhere. That distinction matters if a service has data-residency requirements, and it is worth settling before the build, not after.

Where should a department start?

With the single service that generates the most phone calls. Give that one a status a resident can check themselves, and measure the call volume before and after. It is the cheapest proof a transformation programme can buy.