Singapore government uses tech to serve citizens, businesses

Source: Smart Nation & Digital Government Office, Singapore. Considerations for easing the flow of high-quality data across government agencies.

Kok Yam Tan, Deputy Secretary, Smart Nation & Digital Government Office, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore said that technology is used in Singapore to serve businesses and citizens better.

Speaking at the first-ever AWS ASEAN Public Sector Summit in Singapore he said that key characteristics of the strategy include providing a digital architecture for the country; serving citizens and businesses from a user-centric stance; and providing a pro-developer operating environment;. Tan highlighted the national digital identity in 2020 to illustrate how the strategy has been applied to real life.

The Singapore government has been moving towards a national digital infrastructure over the years with trusted transactions of personal data, most recently with a mobile app. People can use a QR code to identify themselves, as opposed to using a physical identity card, and provide personal details to government agencies and businesses with a single click.

The national digital infrastructure can even be exported, Tan said. Singapore is talking to other governments about replicating the infrastructure, with potential pilots to digitalise cross-border flows of people, services, or goods.

The focus on continual improvement boils down to the philosophy "that we should walk with the citizen for his particular journey and be with him at that moment his life," Tan said. Those moments are made as user-friendly as possible.

For example, the government is removing the need for citizens to navigate organisational bureaucracy, such as replacing intelligent voice response (IVR) systems with technology that can recognise natural speech. Another example is bringing together all the different services that new parents would need to undergo with a Moments of Life app, from registering the baby's birth to applying for grants.

"It doesn't help you give birth but everything else is covered," he said.

The Moments concept is being extended to the silver generation, who now have one-stop access to government benefits as of September 2019. The same concept could also apply to businesses, which need to apply to different government agencies for various services across different growth stages.

All this is only possible through a unified government data architecture and a unified government technology stack that handles provisioning and orchestration, leaving developers to focus on front-end solutions, Tan said. The CODEX* (Core Operations, Development Environment, and eXchange) platform taps on the commercial cloud and enables developers to build new services better, cheaper and faster. It has reduced the time taken for cross-agency data sharing from six-13 months to seven working days.

Today, citizens are only asked for data once, and that data is accessed and distributed in a secure way. "We want to make this data lifecycle as automated, as facilitated, and as standardised as possible, both to ensure innovation and to have a high level of data security for the data that we hold," he said.

"It's about reducing duplicative work through the public sector."

Cloud is a key enabler for the government, as it allows scalability and resiliency for service delivery, Tan shared. With the national digital identity, the government could not predict the scale of takeup. The elasticity of cloud provision provides assurance that services can be delivered. The number of services available has also made it possible to deliver and enhance services easily.

"New capabilities enable new ways of working," Tan concluded.

There have been challenges to the strategy nonetheless. It is a new way of operating things and requires a mindset change, Tan said. This has changed how the government works across agencies, between the people operating the services and the people developing the software solutions, and how processes and policies evolve. "There are new forms of risk and risk management," Tan said.

"We are all learning togegther as a public sector. The best thing that cities can do, that nations and governments can do, is learn from one another. We want to think of new ways of collaborating across borders. It's vital when technology is moving so fast and the industry innovating so fast," Tan added.

The government is also developing competencies with commercial organisations and building on hackathons to grow further. "We want to bring in companies like AWS to work together to develop new ways of doing things," he said.

*CODEX, announced in 2018, features re-usable digital components, including machine readable data flows, middleware and microservices. These are shared across agencies so that developers can plug and play with the resources and focus on building products to serve the public better instead. The adoption of common tools and standards, within the government and by Smart Nation vendors, is designed to reduce bugs and raise the quality, reliability and security of government services.