How Singapore can build an agile GovTech ecosystem
By DXC Technology
A public sector workshop on 26 April will share lessons from the world’s most innovative companies.
Image: Book Sprints - CC BY-SA 2.0
These companies have taken an agile approach to how they built their services, and much of it is driven by flexibility that cloud platforms provide. How can private sector experience with cloud inform how governments provide public services?
An upcoming workshop by DXC Technology and Amazon Web Services will share secrets for GovTech from the most innovative companies in the world. We take a look at what agencies can learn, and how they can implement these approaches.
Lessons from tech giants
The speed, agility and cost-effectiveness of service delivery are the greatest benefits that cloud technology affords to governments. “Cloud provides the infrastructure to support much more rapid launch and evolution of services, and is much less expensive,” says Mark Berner, Director of Cloud Transformation Practice at DXC Technology.
It creates an environment that is very supportive of agile development. Agencies can frequently update their services, run tests, and release them to the public. They can easily make changes when they experiment in this way on the cloud, and bring their services to the level that citizens have come to expect from consumer tech platforms like their smartphones.
Another key lesson for governments from the commercial sector is the improved security that cloud provides. “People are adopting public cloud more strongly in order to improve security, as opposed to looking at it as a security risk,” Berner adds.
This is particularly crucial in Singapore, where an open and competitive GovTech landscape has led to a multi-vendor but highly siloed tech environment in government. Agencies can reduce replication, improve consistency, and have higher standards across departments by building a common security regime in the cloud.
Five-pronged approach
Berner advocates a five-pronged approach to adopting cloud, to help agencies deliver agile and secure services rapidly and effectively:
- Pull together all the key stakeholders across the agency into a task force committed to driving the outcomes the agency most needs
- Build a plan for what the agency wants to achieve from digitalisation and make these the goals for the cloud adoption strategy
- Work with a partner to develop and deploy a cloud blueprint that simplifies governance and encourages rapid adoption
- Continue with the partner to develop a holistic phased adoption and migration plan
- Conduct pilot migrations while building the plan to gain insight and inform the planning process
- Philip Heah, Assistant Chief Executive, Technology and Infrastructure, IMDA, Singapore
- Dan Angelucci, Chief Technology Officer, DXC Technology, Asia
- Julian Lau, Head of Solution Architects, Public Sector, AWS ASEAN