Governments are evolving during the COVID-19 pandemic

The next normal for government will involve a digital economy, more personalisation, and new regulatory frameworks.

COVID-19 is not a change agent but a digital accelerant that has caught governments unprepared, said Gerald Wang, Head/Associate Director, Asia Pacific Public Sector, IDC. Speaking at a SAS webinar titled Facing Off Against COVID-19: Spurring the Digital Economy, Establishing Personalized ‘Push’ Public Services, and Evolving Regulatory Frameworks for Singapore’s Infocomm Media Ecosystem, Wang said the conversation had begun with the need to go online and work remotely and evolved into a discussion on enhancements.

"Now the conversation has gone beyond accessibility - (it is about) how do we automate, how do we do things better," he said.

IDC posits that a 'U' curve happens during a lockdown. "At each point of the curve, people are thinking differently, of how to deal with the situation, flattening the curve," he said.

The first wave is about digitisation. In Singapore, Wang observed that there had been a surge in PC and monitor sales by parents who had to deal with their children beginning remote learning, and employees who had to work from home.

"Resilience was being built," Wang said. "We were getting used to things, juggling things within the home space."

Today, stimulus measures are different from the beginning of the 'U' as well. Wang said stimulus measures in Singapore typically flow to larger organisations, with the expectation that some will trickle down to the wider economy. "Stimulus measures are very different at this point in time, it's not just in Singapore - they're going direct to local businesses, the local workforce, people in communities – focusing on building resilience, helping you transform digitally within your own space, within your office space," he said.

IDC's COVID-19 research with governments is in its 10th iteration, Wang said. In focus group discussions in Singapore, government agencies have commented that staff productivity went up 20-30% through working from home. Meetings have been shortened too.

Wang added that businesses have to think about resiliency, ensuring that they can continue providing services under a lockdown while governments are starting to realise that they have to be more self-sustainable domestically.

"We're starting to see the whole rethink and whole reset on how you go about the next (normal)," he said.

Issues that government organisations are grappling with now include:

- Creating digital trust and data compliance, especially in sensitive indutries like healthcare

- Helping people who are not IT-savvy acquire the basic skills and protect themselves and their online identities.

- Promoting media literacy to prevent misinformation

- Personalised push services, which will require more integration of services and data across different agencies, and more analytics to inform the personalised services at different points of a person's life

- Comprehensive communications strategies

Wang noted that government personnel are "starting to realise that every single initiative you roll out has to have a proper communications strategy" both internally and externally. "When you create something, people start questioning what exactly it is, how do I protect myself inside this system," he said.

- New regulatory frameworks

Wang suggested that the first steps towards digital government resilience will involve digital accessibility, automation, and innovation. He observed that silos are still a big issue in government organisations. "Think about where you want to go to and how you are going to get there," he advised. "COVID has really pushed the digital agenda much further than (before COVID)."

The accessibility pillar will involve aspects such as providing access to computing devices and other resources; digital skills; funding and procurement, while the automation pillar covers cradle-to-grave integrated personalised constituent services, digital trust and digital identities, as well as governance and compliance. Innovations to be considered can include new human-computer interfaces as well as business and IT alignment on outcomes.

Wang added that 37.9% of Asia Pacific governments expect to spend more on accessibility, automation and new innovations in 2020 to 2021 due to the pandemic as of August 2020. Some of the top new innovations that governments will spend more on under the innovation pillar include Blockchain (75.5%) and big data (73.8%); top automation technologies being considered for added investment include platform-as-a-service (76.7%) and edge computing solutions (74.5%); while accessibility hardware spending to be boosted include categories such as PCs/notebooks (74.5%) and network equipment (71.7%).

Wang commented that 62.5% of governments in Asia Pacific are planning to spend more on artificial intelligence (AI) as the models trained before COVID-19 struck would not be relevant post-COVID. "We are seeing definitely more spending in the analytics piece," he said.

During the webinar, Randy Goh, MD, SAS Singapore, said the right processes, talents and technology are critical success factors for data science intitiatives. The right objectives and mindsets are also important, he said. "If you're heading in the wrong direction, not knowing where you are going, all the time and effort and the money will not necessarily come to a right result," he said.

Goh described SAS as being in the business of transforming the world of data into a world of intelligence, while Jason Tan, Director Pre-Sales, ASEAN, SAS Software, said that SAS covers the lifecycle of data analytics from "data into insight, and from insight into decisioning". br />
SAS supports over 650 government-linked organisations in 134 countries. In Singapore, these include the Ministry of Defence, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore, as well as various hospitals and academic institutions.SAS technology for governments include offering a searchable metadata repository and catalogue of all data and analytical assets, which reduces duplicated work and enhances collaboration.

SAS has 40,000 employees, more than 2,000 of them in the Asia Pacific region. The company has 85,000 customers in more than 48 countries, and a 95% annual customer retention rate.