Government aims to overhaul IT systems
It will move to centralised approach for more efficiency: PM Lee
There will be a fundamental re-engineering of the Government so it can tap technology to provide better and faster public services at a fraction of the cost.
This will involve radically overhauling or replacing its existing IT systems and revamping its processes.
It will move away from a system where individual agencies build their own e-citizen services and applications to a more centralised approach that will enable such e-services to be created more efficiently.
The Government also plans a significant migration to cloud technology, without compromising on security.
Sharing his vision of how the Government's use of technology will improve the lives of Singaporeans in the future, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said yesterday: "We will fundamentally transform how we develop government software and applications."
COLLABORATION
The key is to get government agencies working together and learning from each other, instead of each trying to reinvent the wheel.
He said: "Instead of every agency building its own bespoke website, at great expense, and often repeating the same coding errors and bugs, we can do it more efficiently and get better results by reusing technologies."
Touching on this, Mr Chan Cheow Hoe, the Government's chief information officer and deputy chief executive of the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech), said: "Every agency is egocentric and wants to build their own thing and have their own vendor. This needs to change."
Both Mr Lee and Mr Chan were speaking at the inaugural Stack 2018 Developer Conference organised by GovTech.
Under the new approach, a central system can be created instead of each agency having its own online licensing processes or Web forms.
"With technology, we can go beyond tweaking existing ways of doing things, to reduce bureaucracy and simplify our processes significantly," Mr Lee said at the Suntec convention centre.
He said agencies will also be able to tap the Singapore Government Technology Stack - a suite of common software components used in app development - to create e-services faster and cheaper.
At the same time, the Government was getting ready to put many of its systems and services on the cloud - instead of onsite - where they could operate round the clock, without the need for expensive dedicated backups.
He said the recent data breach at SingHealth was a harsh reminder that cyberspace is not a benign environment.
"We must continually strike the right balance between security and usability," said Mr Lee.
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