Letter: The invisible scaffolding behind public sector tech

Dear reader, 

It’s easy to get caught up in the global tech headlines on the next artificial intelligence (AI) breakthroughs. But as I looked back at the top stories for the past month, I found a much more interesting narrative unfolding.  

May was about top-down tech mandates moving toward ground-up problem solving, be it the silent work of building the accountability infrastructure to scaling practical tools for daily tools.  

Take Singapore’s public healthcare sector, where nurses at the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital didn’t wait for their IT department to fix bottlenecks.  

Using the government-secure GPT tool, Pair, they built their own chatbot to automate the protocol lookups and dose calculations right on the ward floor.  

This kind of grassroots problem solving is exactly what central agencies were trying to scale! 

GovTech Singapore also launched a one-stop marketplace platform, which helps public agencies easily discover, match, and source the right digital tools for their specific use cases. 

The rise of citizen developers, aka non-technical officers building tech-based solutions, also demands new guardrails.  

As GovTech's Deputy Chief Executive and Chief Technology Officer Chang Sau Sheong recently highlighted, governments have spent years classifying data. Now, they must pivot to classifying AI-generated code to keep pace with automated tools.  

Speakers at GovInsider’s AIxGov event echoed this focus on foundational trust, noting that truly resilient governance cannot be tackled as an afterthought, and must be baked into the daily workflows. 

These digital tools and frameworks are powerful, but only if they are accessible to everyone. True inclusion requires extending infrastructure to the furthest edges of society.  

This was what Indonesia’s BAKTI Komdigi tackled through central-local government partnerships to close the connectivity gap and build infrastructure across the remote North Maluku Islands. 

The takeaway from May is that the next frontier of digital governance isn't about chasing the flashiest demo.  

It’s about building robust platforms, embedding trust by design, and stepping back to let your teams solve real-world problems! 

Si Ying Thian  
Senior Reporter  
GovInsider