Undaunted: How Singapore’s HTX embraces failure to drive innovation

A government agency that gives awards for unsuccessful projects?

That is one initiative by Singapore’s HTX (Home Team Science and Technology Agency), which was featured in the country’s national broadsheet, The Straits Times, for its Undaunted Award earlier this year.

The award has recognized 15 unsuccessful projects thus far.

“We must create an environment that allows people to test things and trial new ideas, even though on first pass it may not pass the smell test,” says HTX’s Chief Innovation Officer, Ng Pan Yong, in conversation with GovInsider.

“The Undaunted Award was created to show that right at the top, at the Chief Executive level, we will allow failure to happen,” he says. For Ng, allowing failure is critical to create a space where innovation can thrive.

GovInsider sat down with Ng recently to hear more on his approach to enabling innovation.

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A common set of digital capabilities

If you’ve passed through Singapore’s AI-powered automated border clearance at the airports before, you’ve benefitted from HTX’s pioneering work.

HTX was set up in 2019 within the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to oversee the central science and technology capabilities of Singapore’s Home Team, which guards Singapore’s safety and security. The Home Team comprises the Singapore Police Force, the Immigrations and Checkpoints Authority, Singapore Civil Defence Force, and seven other agencies.

As Chief Innovation Officer, Ng looks not just at the broader innovation landscape in HTX, but also the IT infrastructure that powers developers’ efforts to strengthen the Home Team’s digital capabilities.

Platforms for better developer experience

Currently, the team is focused on improving developer experience through platform engineering, shares Ng.

“We’re doing a whole lot more platform engineering to extract some of these best practices, or golden paths… so developers can self-service as the platforms are in place for them to be super productive,” he says.

By maintaining a core set of capabilities and engineering “golden paths”, developers can focus on building applications that can address critical problems, shares Ng.

Such golden paths can include baking in compliance and security into code, so that developers can build and deploy secure code by default. In turn, this removes the cognitive load of worrying about infrastructure, focusing efforts on building applications.

HTX has built its own tech stack on the foundations of the Singapore Tech Stack (SGTS) to facilitate these golden paths, wrote Ng on his LinkedIn newsletter, Making of a Sovereign Cloud, previously.

SGTS provides government developers with common reusable components, such as digital identity modules, data science modules, and development tools.

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Embarking on a first-of-its-kind sovereign cloud

This philosophy of providing the best developer experience is steering one of HTX’s key projects right now – its upcoming sovereign cloud project with Microsoft, the first of its kind in Singapore.

As HTX supports the Home Team, it provides digital infrastructure for more sensitive projects, such as those related to immigration, prison records, and so on.

This project allows HTX to provide developers with advanced analytics, AI, and other cloud-native tools available on the commercial cloud, with the sovereignty requirements necessary to run more sensitive workloads.

A regular private cloud initiative would only enable the team to run basic services, shares Ng.

“Ultimately, is our core mission to try and replicate hyperscaler capabilities? The answer is no,” says.

“We need to focus our engineering resources around the areas we need to innovate in. On the shoulders of what the hyperscaler does, we focus on building capabilities relevant to the Home Team to achieve our mission.”

He shares that the sovereign cloud will be just one node in HTX’s multi-cloud architecture, which includes workloads on the Government Commercial Cloud (GCC 2.0) as well as other on-premises solutions, as part of its approach to ensure resilience.

AI for home team innovation

Early this year, HTX announced that the agency would be adopting an AI-first approach to innovation.

As HTX oversees the science, engineering, and digital capabilities in the Home Team, they are in a unique position to integrate these three pillars with AI tools, he notes.

“The AI-first approach gives us that focus and says, how do we make AI more pervasive across the whole organisation?” Ng says.

This approach encourages employees to “sharpen their thought processes” on where AI can be applied. This includes recent efforts to improve employee experience by making Microsoft Copilot available for staff to make slides, summaries, and graphs with, he says.

HTX is also working on applying AI to drive improvement in citizen experiences, he shares.

“The hard number is that we have an ageing population. If you ask the Civil Defence, there are more calls to 995 (Singapore’s emergency services hotline),” he shares. AI can help ease such loads, better service citizens, and support officers in achieving mission objectives, he notes.

He notes that it is critical to take a measured approach to AI adoption and be judicious about which use-cases to apply AI for. A human-in-the-loop approach will continue to be necessary, he says.

Innovation, failure, and what’s next

Looking ahead, HTX hopes to continue investing more in AI and the workforce, Ng shares.

Meanwhile, as technology becomes more accessible, HTX hopes to empower non-technical staff to build their own digital tools to improve their workflows by providing them with the right platforms, he says – a citizen developer strategy.

More broadly, he hopes to remove impediments to innovation, which are not necessarily technical in nature. This includes processes and mindsets which stand in the way of agile development and incorporating new tools within operations.

By addressing these challenges, Ng hopes to continue nurturing a culture where people are “allowed to fail better, fail forward, and make things better” and innovation can thrive.