GI reflects: How digital government has evolved over the past decade

A decade is a long time in technology development, but the conventional wisdom over much of the last century has been that 10 years is just a middling period with respect to how public sector policy evolves and changes. 

That concept has dramatically changed since the middle of the last decade.  

Governments around the world have been taking the lead to build an integrated, open and interoperable stack of digital public infrastructure (DPI) to realise broader societal benefits.

Digitalised public services are also changing how common citizens live, work and play. 

In November 2014, Singapore took one step forward on this journey by boldly declaring that it would build a Smart Nation, by releasing a blueprint for this.

While GovInsider was not around to report on the launch of the Smart Nation blueprint, we have been chronicling how the Republic has been systematically building up its digital infrastructure to ensure that government services are delivered online seamlessly and safely.

With the benefit of hindsight, one can say that the blueprint was not just about shiny brochures and PowerPoint presentations – it was a clarion call by the government to build digital tools and solutions that created better services for the citizens. 

One of the first stories that GovInsider published on September 30, 2015, was titled, Exclusive: Singapore’s radical new transport plan which talked about developing public transport on demand.

The Singapore government's resolve to encourage the use and development of digital tools to create radical new concepts could be gauged by the fact that the then Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, shared the story on Twitter. 

In 2016, we reported how the bulk of the government’s annual information and communications technology (ICT) tenders for that year were earmarked to build the engine for delivering digital services and data analytics.  

The former GovTech CEO-Designate Jacqueline Poh, who now heads JTC, noted that the procurement would help to “lay out some of the critical foundations that will eventually lead up to full-fledged Smart Nation applications in future”.  

She went on to add that these would include more efficient data centres and expanded WiFi access across classrooms in government schools to support smart learning.   

Examining these announcements today, it’s clear that the focus has been on building capacity to transition to the cloud and deliver seamless services.   

As we have reported here and here, cloud computing continues to be a key focus for the government.  

Ubiquitous connectivity  

For cloud computing, connectivity is an important factor.   

Fortunately for the government, rapid advances in mobile technology have helped to provide ubiquitous access.  

In 2018, Vivian Balakrishnan, who was then Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation initiative, among his other responsibilities, set out a vision for citizens to interact with government and businesses almost entirely through their smartphones.  

More government agencies were transferring payments and reimbursements via citizens’ identity card numbers, he said.   

With mobile telephony advances, 5G has become key to Singapore realising its ambition to become a Smart Nation.  

There has also been a realisation that the public sector itself must change – it cannot operate in a vacuum.   

In 2019, PM Lee noted that there will be a “fundamental re-engineering” of the government to provide better and faster public services “at a fraction of the cost”.  

Fast forward today, that re-engineering effort is still very much on, with artificial intelligence (AI) becoming a major driving force.  

The government recognised that its role was to ensure the use of AI for public good.  

In October last year, Singapore Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Lawrence Wong, said Smart Nation 2.0 would seek to achieve three key goals: Trust, Growth, and Community.  

 “These goals will serve as a compass, shaping how we use technology to improve citizens’ lives and create a thriving digital future for all,” he added. He added that AI would be integral to Smart Nation 2.0.  

Digital public infrastructure 

GovInsider has chronicled how the rise of DPI was a testament to the fact that private sector competition wasn't enough to drive innovation.  

Before DPI, societies would struggle with digital services that are fragmented and duplicated, as they relied on privately owned and often proprietary systems for identity, payments and data exchange.   

As we have reported, the success story of DPI enabling financial inclusion for Estonia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, among many others, underscored a crucial lesson: that transformative digital ecosystems rarely emerged organically from siloed, private sector innovation.  

This clearly demonstrates that for digital public goods, including DPI, to be universal, trustworthy and beneficial to all citizens, governments must take the decisive lead to build them, establishing standards, and ensuring they last.  

The Singapore Tech Stack, which includes reusable, common components, also empowers government developers to build quickly and cost-efficiently.   

These common products help to standardise digital product development in the government and create a consistent experience of how citizens engage with the government.   

As AI becomes more pervasive in our daily lives, there is also a growing interest among governments to develop their own public AI infrastructure, which would serve as a solid foundation to ensure that AI systems are developed and governed for the public good. 

Open-source digital public goods have also helped some governments to leapfrog in building their digital governments, as well as to pool their resources together and learn from each other to solve public problems.  

A publicly owned technology stack is presented as a strategy to tackle rising digital sovereignty concerns.   

For example, the EuroStack strategy aims to boost Europe's strategic autonomy by addressing the fact that 80 per cent of its digital technology and infrastructure comes from abroad.  

Governments must do more than just regulate; they need to become active architects of the internal digital core.   

By taking the lead to build, standardise and sustain digital public goods, nations can ensure strategic autonomy, drive inclusion and cultivate innovation that serves all citizens, not just market interests.   

Cyberattacks in parallel to digitalisation  

Increased digitalisation also meant increased cyberattacks. 

This was more so for a highly digitalised country like Singapore, which is both a financial sector as well an innovation hub.   

While there had been individual cyberattacks on Singapore's public infrastructure over the past 10 years, the first major one happened in February 2017 when Singapore’s Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) servers were hacked, with personal data of 850 national servicemen and employees stolen.  

In 2018, the Singapore public sector faced what has been, to date, the nation’s biggest cyberattack.

As we reported in July of that year, hackers targeted SingHealth and the personal data of 1.5 million patients were stolen, with 160,000 of these patients, including the then Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, having their outpatient prescription data stolen as well.  

The Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) said the attack was deliberate, targeted and well-planned and was likely “state-sponsored” – more as a show of capability than for actual monetary gain.

A point to note, and which we will return to later, was that despite using the term “state-sponsored” CSA did not name the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group responsible.  

The attack on SingHealth was part of a pattern of cyberattacks on Singapore orchestrated by APT groups, which were often state-backed groups with huge resources.  

In 2017, before the SingHealth attack, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) were targeted by APT groups looking for government and advanced research data.  

The standard Singapore government response to APT attacks has been robust defence with a low-key public admission using words like “likely” and “maybe” to describe the origins of these hacking attempts.  

That approach changed earlier this year.   

In July, Singapore’s Coordinating Minister for National Security, K. Shanmugam, dropped the bombshell that the country’s critical infrastructure (CII) was being attacked by a highly sophisticated state-backed advanced persistent threat (APT) group classified as UNC 3886.  

As we mentioned in our report, the naming of the APT group was significant because it had earlier been identified as being closely associated with Chinese government entities.  

Our report speculated that the public attribution to cyber-attacks likely indicated a strategic shift, making Singapore more aligned with a global trend of naming and exposing sophisticated threat actors, particularly those suspected of being state-backed.  

As GovInsider looks forward to the next decade, it's obvious to us that thanks to AI and agentic AI as well as general-purpose AI (GPAI), public sector innovation in Singapore and around the world will get even more exciting.  

We look forward to reporting and commenting on that for the benefit of our readers.