Platform approach key to accelerate GenAI adoption across government

Singaporeans spend some 30 million hours on hold with customer service – an inefficiency which costs the country an estimated S$1.24 billion, according to ServiceNow’s Customer Experience Intelligence Report 2024.

When it comes to citizen services, 90 per cent of the respondents said the government needs to invest in technology to reduce wait times, with 50 per cent of people spending almost two hours for issues to be resolved.

ServiceNow’s Asia-Pacific (APAC) President, Detlef Krause, took the position that generative AI (GenAI), coupled with a platform approach, can speed up resolution time and optimise customer experience.

He was speaking at the opening of “Enhancing Public Sector Services through a Unified Digital Platform”, an event co-hosted by ServiceNow and GovInsider on August 27, 2024, in Singapore.

Singapore government leaders, representing the Central Provident Fund (CPF) and the Ministry of Trade & Industry (MTI), shared how taking a platform or digital control tower approach towards digital innovation has enabled agency collaboration and service integration around citizen needs.

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Platforms enable whole-of-government collaboration

Swiveling from window to window, workflow to workflow, app to app – is that the daily experience of customer support today?

“Swivel chair syndrome” and the tradeoff between efficiency and experience are some of the key pain points faced by the public sector in citizen service delivery, highlighted by ServiceNow’s APAC & Japan’s Innovation Officer, CK Tan, in his keynote speech.

“[Public sector] employees have to go through multiple teams, departments or agencies in order to resolve one customer issue,” he explained.

While Singapore’s digital government is ahead of its APAC counterparts, he pointed out three areas of improvement that the government could consider: reducing wait times, enabling agency integration, and providing greater empathy to improve citizen delivery.

A digital control tower approach is not new

In fact, the government is not new to taking a platform approach to digital innovation.

Gone are the days when it was sufficient for agencies to provide seamless service at the agency level. Today, citizens and businesses expect services to be integrated across the whole of government.

In one panel, CPF’s Group Director (Housing and Investment), Janice Lai, raised the example of LifeSG, a Singapore government app that bundles 200 services to support the key moments in life every citizen experiences.

This is why a digital control tower approach, which enables agencies to view all information, processes, and data from a single vantage point, would not be a paradigm shift for the Singapore government.

“I imagine it to be that platform for us to coordinate our actions. It’s going to be a system of action, where we can detect breaks in services or processes and direct them to relevant agencies to take action.

“To me, a central platform or digital tower would need to help to achieve our three service outcomes – as we call it 3E: Easy, Effective and Empathetic,” she explained.

CPF’s Lai shared that in 2021, Service SG was set up within the Public Service Division (PSD) to break down agency silos, transform and drive the next bound of government service delivery.

PSD is the central body managing management and career development in the civil service.

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GenAI enables citizen experience

The integration of humans and robots will be a key aspect of the fifth industrial revolution, and GenAI can be an enabler of this collaboration, said ServiceNow’s Tan.

GenAI should not just be seen as another innovation, but as an opportunity to improve the way we work - through human-centered design, he explained.

Digital research and advisory firm Ecosystm’s VP Industry Insights, Sash Mukherjee emphasised the need to focus on outcomes than siloed use cases around GenAI.

“Just because another agency has got a chatbot, that doesn’t mean you need one,” she said. Instead of adopting tech for the sake of it, agencies should focus on their key business problems and develop solutions that directly improve outcomes.

MTI’s Director (GoBusiness), Chong Wai Yin, in another panel reiterated the same point that GenAI exploration should not just be for the sake of adopting new technologies but to address current pain points.

People and processes come before technology – and that is the approach MTI takes, she said. The agency is currently exploring GenAI use cases, particularly to streamline licensing compliance and requirements for businesses.

Businesses, like citizens themselves, have raised the same concern of having to interface with multiple government agencies when setting up operations.

Chong called a unified digital platform as “the mother of all systems” as everyone would expect that platform to do everything all at once.

“While we have big dreams, we need to start small.” She advised onboarding the agency’s most important or core services on the platform first before moving onto others.