Letter: Trust is government's real infrastructure

Dear reader,

Every month, we try to look for a thread connecting our top stories. July’s was around how trust isn’t an end product to ship, but a work-in-progress on the systems that people already rely on.

GovInsider opened the month with our inaugural Young & Official Special Report, spotlighting close to 100 public officers aged 35 and under from more than 40 agencies across nine countries.

One of them, GovTech Singapore's Joshua Tan, who builds authentication tools for Singpass, told us that talent is the single biggest lever for public sector transformation, ahead of regulation or tech.

His reasoning was that talent is what makes the other two levers work.

Capable people know which tech actually solves a problem, and can shape regulation that protects the public without stifling innovation.

Building trust into systems is also a process, which showed up when Singapore extended its national digital ID Singpass passkeys to iPhone users this month.

Instead of adding another password to remember, passkeys are tied to a single device and check a user's physical proximity before granting access, fighting what phishing scams have exploited for years.

Sometimes, more is less. Singapore’s national health tech agency, Synapxe, is folding three separate public healthcare cluster apps into a single HealthHub from November, so residents will no longer juggle logins across providers to manage their own care.

And at Singapore's Centre for Healthcare Innovation (CHI), a new Workforce Accelerator is applying the same logic to jobs themselves, prototyping 36 redesigned healthcare roles built around what patients need, and not more for the sake of it!

The takeaway from July: the next leap in digital government is whether people trust the systems and each other enough to let how they work change.

Si Ying Thian
Senior Reporter
GovInsider