We share some intriguing highlights of the opening day of the recent Digital Government Exchange (DGX).
“The government has a customer… finally”.
This statement symbolised an important breakthrough for Digital Government in a Smart Nation.
IDA Assistant Chief Executive Chan Cheow Hoe: Smart Nation is about delivering responsive and anticipatory public services, and making citizens’ lives better
Speaking at the inaugural Digital Government Exchange (DGX) 2016, Mr Chan Cheow Hoe, Government Chief Information Officer and Assistant Chief Executive (Government Chief Information Office), Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), said Smart Nation is about delivering responsive and anticipatory public services and making citizens’ lives better.
This means engaging citizens as customers in order to better understand their requirements.
Up till recently, however, the concept was still quite an alien one in the public sector. “The government never perceived citizens as customers because it was all supply-driven.
‘We know what is best for the citizens. We give this to them.’ That was the approach.”
But things have changed. “We have gone from inside-out to outside in, from a government-centric to a citizen-centric approach,” said Mr Chan.
Things have changed so much, in fact, that one of challenges facing Digital Government today is the changing paradigm in citizen demands. Mr Chan said he often gets asked why the government cannot be more like an Amazon.com.
The truth is, the public sector will never be an Amazon.com.
“A commercial site is one that you want to go to; a government site is one that you have to go to. It is very different,” he said. “But we will have to marry them to deliver services that are useful for citizens.”
Another thing that a Digital Government has to do is to resolve what Mr Chan calls “the data conundrum”. “Everybody wants data to be open, but the process of opening data is difficult. It goes back to the question of ownership. How do we break this cycle of ‘my data versus your data’?”
There is also the issue of data quality. Singapore embarked on its open data journey with a focus on quantity, on how many data sets there were, said Mr Chan.
“After a while, we realised that it was quite meaningless. “It’s not about the number of datasets but the quality of the datasets. How do we move away from just Excel spreadsheets and PDFs? It is now more about APIs and about getting people to tell stories with data. That is the way data is evolving.”
Former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer focusing on Internet, Privacy and Innovation Policy, Nicole Wong: The data has to be easy to find, accessible and interoperable.
Sharing similar insights from the United States (US), Ms Nicole Wong, former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer focusing on Internet, Privacy and Innovation Policy, said the mission of data in government is “to responsibly unleash the power of data for the benefit of the public and maximise the nation’s return on its investment in data”.
In order for this to happen, the data has to be open and machine-readable. While taking into account issues such as privacy and national security, the data has to be easy to find, accessible and interoperable, she said.
Another aspect of Digital Government is the need to stay relevant and agile.
Elaborating on this, Mr Chan said: “We are in a painful stage of life right now. Technology is going so fast that staying relevant is difficult. We struggle every day to keep relevant and agile.”
He pointed out that being agile does not mean doing everything that the government wants to do.
“We have to do some things quickly, and yet plan for the long term. It we do not do this and plan ahead in terms of infrastructure, at the end of the day things will suffer because we will not be able to scale.”
The topic of agility and relevant was also highlighted by Mr Paul Shetler, Chief Executive Officer of the Digital Transformation Office in Australia.
In trying to stay agile and relevant, one of the things that governments have to deal with is their high risk aversion, said Mr Shetler, who advocated a risk reduction methodology to tackle this.
Chief Executive Officer of Australia's Digital Transformation Office, Paul Shetler: Start with user needs, develop a minimum viable product, and cut risk and lock in success every single step of the way.
In delivering public sector services, a typical government approach would be to come up with a policy, extrapolate from there to find out what is required, and then procure, build and roll out the services. It is usually only at that point that the government knows if the service really meets the users’ needs, he noted.
One way for governments to reduce risk is to start with discovery. “Find out what it is that the user is trying to do, understand the policy constraints, technology constraints and the environment that we operate in,” he said. From there, come up with a hypothesis as to what the government is trying to do, and then start by doing something small that you can expand or iterate very quickly.
“Start with user needs, develop a minimum viable product, and cut risk and lock in success every single step of the way.”
Ms Wong and Mr Shetler were amongst the foreign delegates from nine countries who attended DGX 2016, a closed-door dialogue amongst CIOs of leading eGovernments and public sector leaders.
Besides the US and Australia, other countries that were represented included Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The two-day event was jointly organised by the Ministry of Finance and IDA.
.webp)