Notes from the World Bank eDevelopment Thematic Group workshop on “The Singapore Experience“ on 30 September in Washington DC.

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Sharing on Government Transformation by Crimsonlogic Pte Ltd

Topic: eGovernance to yield greater socio-economic impact

Speaker: Mr. TAN Sian Lip, Vice President

Public private partnership company

• built by Singapore government
• run as a private company
• providing government services

Singapore Trade Facilitation Journey

On the last 20 years

• Almost everybody in the trade-sector changed their technology
• Administrative roles changed in the last 20 years
• The public didn’t experience any change

Tradenet

• Harmonizing trade admission procedures for companies evolved
• “TradeNet -World’s First Nationwide Electronic Data Interchange System”
• Minimizing processing time for admission to 1 minute
• there exist 2 business case studies, it has been well documented
• many international partnerships, facilitating trade on ports worldwide

Singapore eJudiciary

LawNet

• Platform for processing legal information
• Keeping data digital
• Less hardcopies
• Higher clearance rate
• Cases take shorter time
• Transparency through online availability of cases
• good rating in international comparison

Lessons learnt – Principles of eGovernment

• The application of IT to transform the way governments work, to make them friendlier and more effective
• It is not (just) a large portfolio of technology projects
• It is a large ongoing program of activities involving public administrators and technologists in rethinking how government & the public can work together, and then applying technology to effect the changes

Infrastructure: e-things change all the time, there is always something better

• you should plan carefully so that changes don’t destroy your system, but can be absorbed

Constraints:

• There are never enough resources to design & build all possible eServices

It’s important to build the eServices which have the biggest impact on citizens and business

Partnerships between governments and private companies in developing and implementing services on a risk-and investment-sharing basis

Q & A:

Is there a legalframework for exchangig data online?

• electronic transactions act – very broad
• Computer misuse act
• In Singapore PKI is not so common
• Electronic banking has existed for years and transactions not signed with PKI

Is there competition for IDA in Singapore?

• yes, there is international competition, other companies are bidding for contracts too, but so far no success

Who selects what applications have the highest impact on citizens and businesses?

• The specific agencies decide what the governmental agenda should be
• Then they have to fight for the budget

Common components for eServices?

• Governance is primary
• Architecture is handmade into it
• Basic network, basic logging mechanism, web service gateways, portal infrastructure should be common

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Sharing on Government Transformation by NCS Pte Ltd

Topic: Effective Development – Why is there a need for Public Services Infrastructure (PSi)

Speaker: Mr. NG Beng Lim, General Manager

Company: NCS – national computer system

• providing government services

Key concerns in Singapore:

• economic growth
• education
• utilization of resources
• making society a better place
• how to use IT to promote these issues?

Areas to address:

• governance, administration
• services for citizens
• integrating IT into society
• better management of resources
• developing economy based on IT – in the long term

Every country has to have a clear masterplan what to do with IT

• But how to come from the masterplan to an implementation and successful rollout?

Transformation of IT during the 80s and 90s to today

• Nowadays the prerequisites for successful eServices rollout are ideal
• In early 2000 – government in Singapore started Public Services Infrastructure
• Interface for people to interact with the government
• open infrastructure to more providers – including the private sector

Public Services Infrastructure Components:

• Government Network
• Common Data Centre
• Application Infrastructure
• Common Desktop Services

Features:

• Single sign on
• SMS, email gateway
• personalisation
• service delivery framwork
• ePayment
• Orchestration
• multilingual

Results:

• PSi was started 10 years ago
• Today: SHINE (Service Wide Hosting Environment) by NCS
• Billing model: Subscription-based
• Evens out peak CPU utilisation
• SHINE: Hosting, services and storing on demand

NCS – in the mean time a lot of experience in eGovernment & National ICT Planning

Q & A:

Does the government have a centralised architecture?

• Yes, in Singapore the government came up with a centralized infrastructure

What about security standards?

• The IT infrastructure has to come with an own security framework already

Key objecticves in terms of consilidating the data?

• Make people use the system
• “Selling” tools to the ministries

Many agencies – one government. Government has to have the oversight, but agencies have to have the freedom to act on themselves.

Is there a trend for re-centralization?

• It’s technologically possible
• Is it possible to monitor all local spots where services are running?