Digital Transformation in Government Insight #64:
Singapore's Digital Blueprint

Digital governments

Digital services are a high priority for most governments around the world, as we try to deliver benefits to citizens by making the most of the available technology. In our digital transformation in government (DTIG) series, we often look at case studies and policies from Australia and also from around the world. This issue, we’re looking at Singapore's digital services strategy. While not an official community (like the open source community), government services around the world can always learn from what others are doing.

Singapore’s Digital Blueprint

Singapore’s Digital Blueprint was launched in June this year and covers a variety of deliverables for 2023. There’s a great, visual summary of the Blueprint, or you can read the full document.

The Blueprint includes an effective visual of the strategy, based on a circular design. At the centre (core) of the circle is the vision, represented by two areas — ‘digital to the core’ and ‘services with heart’. The next three layers around the circle are broken into what, who and how.

The what layer of the circular diagram covers six key areas: digitally enabled, digitally confident, easy to use, seamless, secure and reliable, and relevant. However, these are read in the context of the next layer, which covers the who — public officers, citizens and businesses.

The next layer is the how, which is specific strategies.

Public officers

The what for public officers is digitally enabled and digitally confident. Digitally enabled refers to the workplace and ensuring public sector personnel have access to data and technology to deliver better services and improve productivity. Digitally confident is about creating a workforce trained to make the most of digital technologies and data.

Within these two areas, there are specific deliverables the Singapore Government is working on:

1. Building common digital and data platforms — Digital platforms that will make it easier and faster to develop new services, and data standards and architecture to ensure data usability.

2. Raising digital capabilities to deliver innovation — Train public officers to increase general digital skills, while also maximising ICT talent within the government.

Citizens and businesses

For citizens, the Blueprint is focused on ease of use and seamless solutions. For businesses, it’s relevance, and security and reliability.

There are four main deliverables (how) within the Blueprint that cross over between citizens and businesses. They are:

1. Service integration focused on citizen and business needs — Employing a user-centric approach including journey mapping to create services focused on citizens and businesses.

2. Integration between policy, operations and technology — Integration and reengineering of processes for digital transformation.

3. Secure, reliable and resilient systems — Systems built to safeguard citizens, businesses and government.

4. Co-creation with citizens/businesses and facilitating technology adoption — Engage and co-create with businesses and citizens, collaborating with industry to develop user-centred services that experience strong uptake.

Tracking performance

Both the shorter document and the full Blueprint include key performance indicators, broken into these sections:

• Stakeholder satisfaction
• End-to-end digital options
• End-to-end digital transactions
• Digital capabilities
• Transformative digital projects
• Artificial intelligence (AI), data and data analytics

Each of these areas is tracked to 2023, using relevant metrics. For example, for stakeholder satisfaction one of the goals is 75-85% of citizens selecting ‘very satisfied’ in a citizen satisfaction survey, whereas for end-to-end digital transactions the goal is 100% of transactions completed via epayments. The last two pages of the summary document provide a quick, visual presentation of the performance indicators and corresponding metrics.

The Blueprint in detail

The full Blueprint provides much more detail on each of the six strategies above, as well as some of the rationale behind why a digitally enabled government is so important. However, it’s still a relatively short document (34 pages in total, but that includes lots of visuals, section title pages, etc.) — so well worth a read to gauge what another government is up to in digital transformation.

Salsa Digital’s take

The Blueprint itself provides interesting reading and a good insight into Singapore’s digital strategy. The Blueprint is a very accessible document, with lots of visuals to create a faster read. Depending on what area of government you work in, you may be interested in reading the summary, or specific sections of the full document that correlate with your area of expertise. In line with our open everything (Open X) ethos, we believe it’s important to look at what’s happening inside and outside of Australia to promote best practice here and share knowledge and ideas. Singapore’s Blueprint is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse, by reviewing the digital strategy of one of the leading digital nations.