Enhancing Public Service with Tech

ETHOS Issue 25, April 2023

Transforming the Work of the Public Sector in an Age of Scarce Resources

Due to various headwinds in the world today, resourcing has become an increasingly pertinent concern in the tech space, and the public sector has not been spared. GovTech, through the Digital Government Blueprint,¹ is making a difference by helping to realise Singapore’s public sector transformation, particularly in three broad areas: the Future of Work, our Future Workforce, and our Future Workplace.

Under Future of Work, we are leveraging data, and data analytics, to relook at how the public sector should be working in the future, including how public officers interact with, field enquiries from, and work alongside citizens. The pandemic has changed how we work; it has made us realise that a lot of what we do can be digitalised and carried out online for an enhanced experience.

These changes have implications for our Future Workforce. We need to determine the skills which will be relevant to our public officers in the future. It is important to upskill and reskill our public officers, uplifting their digital competencies such as how to make the best use of data and technology tools, as well as cybersecurity. Training aside, it is also about attracting and retaining talent for the public sector. In the past year, we have seen the tech sector slow down their hiring and letting their workers go because of over-hiring during the pandemic. This period of industry correction has provided an opportunity for our public sector to bring in quality digital talent.

With the pandemic unlocking hybrid modes of working and flexible work arrangements, we must explore how to enable more productive, flexible and joyful Future Workplaces. How can we leverage digital technology to improve these new modes of working, enhance collaboration, and at the same time, maintain engagement with our public officers, as well as monitor their health and mental wellbeing? How should team leaders manage their workplaces differently in this new context?

Realising Digital Transformation

The Smart Nation and Digital Government Group (SNDGG), which includes GovTech, typically looks at three sets of stakeholders: citizens, businesses, and the Public Service. As Director of GovTech’s Digital Workplace, my purview is the stakeholder group comprising public officers. Our Future Workplace is one of my key themes of focus, but I also look at the Future of Work and how our public officers can leverage more data, as well as upskilling and other aspects of building up the future public sector workforce that we need.

The work we do goes beyond just gadgets and technology—it also addresses the psychological and cultural aspects of work. For example, team cohesion is an important element of work. After putting in place the technology to let our people connect and work remotely, we need to think about how to enable more seamless interaction and engagement. For example, after providing connectivity tools such as Zoom and SG-Teams, we want to support communities of practice, so we have technologies like Workplace from Meta, to help colleagues come together and share ideas and best practices to help each other level up on areas they may not be strong in. But having technology is one thing—people must also be willing to use the technology. Officers may have webcams, but they may not turn them on during online sessions. Getting people to turn on their webcams is not a technology issue; it’s a cultural one. So, one of our key priorities is the non-tech side of work.

Through various surveys, we know that many public officers have been saying that being provided with and given tech training is one thing, but it is quite another to see it used in the workplace. For instance, do supervisors and leaders model tech adoption? One of the initiatives we have set up to address this is a Government to Employee (G2E) Change Network. We have gathered around 1,400 Change Champions across different roles in the public sector, including some who are in public-facing roles. These are individuals —not necessarily senior leaders—who are passionate about technology and driving digital transformation; they are influencers and ambassadors. At the same time, we also work with senior leaders to help set the direction for where agencies are going, sponsor changes, and empower efforts to do so, embracing both a top-down and bottom-up approach to adopt technology. Our role is to give these champions the right tools and knowledge to lead the change and get their colleagues excited about what technology can do for them.

We also have an online community through which we share the latest products as well as innovative uses of technology. We run workshops based on where the end-user agencies and teams are. These workshops may not always be for IT departments or Chief Information Officers (CIOs), but are often the officers on the ground. We show them how various tech tools can be usefully and securely adopted within the Public Service. We also share how other agencies have leveraged technology. For instance, HDB mounted a camera on a drone and used SG-Teams to do building inspections through livestreamed aerial drone video feeds. If an incident were to occur, this could also be used for crisis coordination and better appraisal of the situation. Such cases demonstrate how we can use available tech to do our work better and faster. By sharing these examples, we inspire new applications and new public sector innovations.

Making Data Available as a Generative Resource

Apart from technology, data is also an increasingly important resource for public sector work. A lot of data has already been made open and available, through platforms like data.gov.sg. Now the issue is whether we can continue to grow this data, and whether people will make use of it to create public value.

What may hold people back from continuing to contribute data? When it comes to sharing data, public agencies typically adopt a mindset of sensitivity and security, and public officers tend to err on the safe side—this has long been ingrained, and for good reasons.

So, we need to work on democratising our data: not only sharing it with the public but also with each other within the Public Service. This is an important workstream for us at GovTech, but it is not so much about technology as it is about good knowledge management, both within and across public agencies.

We need to encourage some mindset shifts. First, are we overclassifying our data? The right classification is important. Some data used to be classified by default for selected senior management meetings. But after consulting the meeting secretariats, we concluded that not everything needs to be classified by default. Some materials are meant to be published later and could be declassified. Do emails you forward to your staff need to be classified? Probably not. We want to inculcate the right leadership behaviours so that the right classification cascades down the workflow and makes useful information more widely available. We want to put in place policies about data sharing: such as right classification to reduce the tendency to overclassify data, and the democratisation of data by granting access according to an officer’s role, instead of by request or by name. This will promote a greater general willingness to share data, within, across and perhaps outside public agencies.

Finally, we need to encourage people to make use of the data, and that means having the right expertise to convert that data into useful insights and innovations. This relates to the work we are doing to upskill people around data analytics and promoting a data-driven culture. It is part of what we term Ops-Tech integration. As tech leaders, we need to work closely with the operations side of agencies so that our changes can reach our colleagues and benefit their actual work.

Resourcing the Digital Workplace

At GovTech, we are building several pieces that will support our public sector's digital transformation.

The first is developing platforms to scale: something we call Scaling 10x. By adopting a platform approach, we can enjoy economies of scale, and achieve ten times the outcome even with constrained resources. The idea is to optimise our resources in an output or outcome-driven way. Some early examples of this include the Singapore Government Tech Stack, which leverages the Government Cloud.² For specific services, such as cyber security, if you were to ask 10 agencies to list their requirements, you will likely have at least five teams asking for the same thing. That means a lot of resources will be spent on duplicating solutions. Instead, once we build a common platform and basic infrastructure, individual agencies can just focus on their mission outcomes and devote more time and resources to serving citizens or doing their work better. They do not have to reinvent the wheel.

Another example is Workpal, a mobile app that enables a number of HR-related functions, from applying for leave to checking one's salary. For some agencies with their own HR systems, we build connections from their systems to shared platforms such as our Digital Business Cards, so they can scale up these functions quickly. Workpal also has a function for booking co-working spaces—which is a Future Workplace initiative meant to support hybrid work. Public officers need not return to their office every day. Instead, they can use a co-working space near their home and use the Workpal mobile app to book these spaces. Agencies can come on board this platform whenever they are ready.

Another approach we are taking has to do with Software as a Service (SaaS). Our Digital Government Blueprint recognises that there is a lot of technology out there that we can already buy as a service, so we do not have to develop it ourselves. Microsoft Teams is a good example of these. Going forward, we are also looking at other SaaS platforms such as Salesforce that could help with customer relationship management (CRM), since many agencies need to touch base with the public. Such systems are the best-in-class globally, so why try to build them ourselves, and at great expense? Instead, we could focus on aspects such as procurement, security, and integration to make these platforms work for the public sector.

Recently we rolled out an App Library, which carries many common tools that have been reviewed to ensure they are compliant with our licensing, security, and other needs. Again, by democratising some of these apps, we are encouraging agencies to see what their counterparts are doing with tech, and to adopt some of these ideas and solutions to benefit their own workplaces.

A third approach we are taking is co-developing new solutions with the industry. This also helps optimise our scarce public sector resources—we work with others to build things we may not be able to build ourselves. This stems from our experience in working with key industry players on our Government on Commercial Cloud, including firms like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Last year, we ran some industry workshops to publicise some of our key initiatives and invited various players to co-develop solutions with us, to benefit public officers as well as citizens and businesses.³

Most importantly, the future workplace is not just about using technologies. Its purpose is to help our officers become more productive and more engaged in their mission, instead of spending time jumping through hoops or dealing with red tape and other unnecessary processes. This is also about retaining people by keeping them engaged with the work they do and creating value for our country and fellow citizens.