Podcast transcript: Start small, act fast and think big to digitally transform government

Oliver Jones

Hello and welcome to ‘Leading into Tomorrow’. This is a new podcast series from EY, where we’ll explore how public sector organizations can innovate to respond to future challenges and opportunities. I’m your host, Oly Jones, EY-Parthenon’s Global Leader for the Government and Public Sector. Each episode, we’re joined by expert guests, for unique insight into how they’ve created new strategies for today’s world and are leading operational transformation to execute those strategies. Our theme in this podcast is digital transformation in government. Our guests are both joining us from Singapore. Chan Cheow Hoe is Chief Digital Technology Officer in the Singapore Government. Hello Cheow Hoe.

Chan Cheow Hoe

Hey, hello Oly, good to be here.

Jones

And Benjamin Chiang is EY’s Asean and Singapore Government & Public Sector Leader. Hello Ben.

Benjamin Chiang

Hi Oly and Cheow Hoe.

Jones

Cheow Hoe, you joined the Singaporean Government, after a long career in the private sector, in 2017. Can you paint a picture for us of the challenges facing Singapore at that time in terms of digital government?

Cheow Hoe

Yeah Oly, governments are, in a sense, stuck in the past, because many of their investments and technology were done many years ago. Because of that, most of the government systems are legacy systems, we are not fulfilling service levels. There were cybersecurity issues, and those challenges have to be addressed very quickly. And every year that passes by, it just gets more and more difficult to do. So, when I first joined, my first year was literally fighting fires, fixing big projects that were failing. Tackling cybersecurity problems, tackling user dissatisfaction with the Government, in terms of their interaction with the Government, etc. and those were quite insurmountable in the very beginning. But we were looking at digital transformation to be the way forward, to make that happen.

Jones

Fast forward to 2021 and the Government’s positioning statement is ‘A Singapore Government that is digital to the core and serves with the heart’. Cheow Hoe, tell us about the strategy you drove to build a digital Government.

Cheow Hoe

Yeah, I think the first thing we realized is that digitalization of the Government is actually a very difficult thing. Mainly because, like most governments, it's a very big organization, it's essentially very fragmented. Every agency has their own staff, and we are plagued by, for lack of a better word, tech debt that was accumulated over many, many years. And the reason why I call it a tech debt, is because all governments run very old legacy systems. And these systems are, in a sense, a hindrance to progress if you ask me. And, because of that, we really need to do transformation right at the core. Digitalization isn't just about technology, it's about serving people. And I remember a phrase that one of my very senior ministers mentioned, and I thought it really resonated with me as well: “The thing about technology is that we need to make sure that with technology, we do things for the people and not to the people.” I thought that was a very interesting insight. You see, the problem is that most people are afraid that the Government will use technology against them, but that's not the point. The point is that we need to use technology for them, and that's why this thing about serving with a heart is actually very important. It allows us to be empathetic to how citizens feel about the interaction in government, and how we can actually make that interaction a lot better, and ease the concerns that a citizen has.

Jones

I'm wondering if I can ask you to give an example of how you involved citizens in the design of services?

Cheow Hoe

Most government agencies look at everything from the inside out, they look at their mission, they create something that they think that best serves their mission, and they push it out to the citizens. And one of the things I realized in the very beginning that kind of shocked me was that most people in the Government never thought they had a customer. It was a very interesting concept, when I kept talking about customers, most of the government agencies and the senior people were puzzled, and said, "No, we are not a commercial organization, we don't really have a customer." And that mindset change in the very beginning was paramount, meaning that we started to convince them that we actually do have a customer, and who's our customer?

Our customers are our citizens, and our businesses that work in the Government. Now, when that mindset changed from in to out, to out to in, all of a sudden there was a big realization that we're not doing a very good job. We realized, I think many people realized all of a sudden, that citizens are not interested in dealing with multiple agencies and the Government. They look at the Government as one Government. Most of the citizens don't go to the Government because they want to, they go to the Government because they have to. I go to the Government because I have to go there, to pay taxes, to sign up for something, to register a license, etc. So, the concept is actually quite different, and we need to keep that, to make that process as simple as possible.

Jones

Ben, if I could bring you in at this point, you work with governments across ASEAN – do you think this kind of citizen-centric approach can work in other countries, perhaps where citizens’ trust in government is less strong than in Singapore?

Chiang

Yup, I do agree that you definitely need trust to do some of the things that Cheow Hoe spoke about. You need trust, you know, for citizens who come forward and invest their time to share with you what the problem is, so that they can then co-create some of these solutions.

You need trust for the private sector, to want to be part of the equal system. How do you get, for example, the private sector to use the Government's national digital identity platform as their authentication mechanism, versus building their own? And you do need a certain level of trust to deliver transformational projects, right? The more transformational the project, the more complex, the more innovative the technology. The bigger the user base, the more trust you need to get the adoption rates to be high. And you're probably very familiar with the saying that goes, "It takes years to build trust, but seconds to break and forever to repair." So, what you do is a question that you ask, what do you do when the trust isn't there? And my recommendation is really, build trust, it does take time, start small, so they can demonstrate the results. So basically, earn it. Build trust one project at a time.

Jones

Thanks, Ben. Coming next, we’ll talk about the execution of digital strategy – the huge task of delivering digital transformation, in public sector organizations.

Audio Sting

Jones

Cheow Hoe, what stands out for you in terms of what’s been different about your approach to executing the transformation? 

Cheow Hoe

Governments outsource probably 95% of everything they do. Most government technology organizations are really project management organizations. They are not tech organizations. And over time, because of the lack of real interaction technology, many government employees have become much more like a contract manager than even a project manager. So, one of the first things that I did, and I was very concerned about, is how do we attract good tech talent in the Government. So that at least, we can become stuck by this, number one, and even if it's possible, become developers of our own solutions. I started, very much, with a squad of seven people, and fast forward to today, we've got more than 1,000 engineers working in the Government. Even from the FAANG companies [Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google], from Silicon Valley, from London, etc. Singaporeans have come back to Singapore, who want to support the Government to solve interesting problems. Now, that to me was a very big gamble we took, it was a very different approach from what most governments have been doing all these years.

Jones

Can I ask you one other question around that? I know that you have spoken before about the importance of innovation processes and working with those outside governments to innovate; do you want to just elaborate on that and give me a few more examples of what you did to innovate?

Cheow Hoe

So, along with creating an engineering culture, was the fact that we had to create an engineering and innovation culture. It's very important, because ultimately if everybody is a civil servant, and follows the similar process, nothing's going to change. So, we looked at the Googles of the world, the Facebooks of the world, and we kind of replicated the kind of innovative, flat hierarchical structure, whereby people were able, from the most junior guy to the most senior guy, were able to contribute ideas and make things happen. So, let me give you one example that we did when we first started. We were talking to the Singapore Civil Defense Organization, which runs emergency ambulances around Singapore. And they found that they were struggling to meet service levels, because they realized that for every call they have, most of the cases that are critical, that involve, for example, a heart attack, etc., they have a response time of about 10 minutes. And they found it impossible to do it. So, when they first came to us, the first approach was, "Can you guys use data science to figure out how to optimize the use of our ambulance fleet?" And my guys did some work on it, in a short period of time they came back and said it's impossible. In a traffic jam, in peak hour, you can't get an ambulance to your case in 10 minutes. It's almost impossible. But one young engineer came up with a great idea, he said, "Why can't we crowdsource lifesaving? If you have an app, that onboards people with Red Cross training, paramedics, doctors, nurses, people who are off duty, and if they are pinged when somebody's near them, within 400 meters of where they are, they can go there, start the intervention, and wait for the ambulance to come." So, it was an idea from a very junior person, one of the engineers who thought of that. And we tried it out, and in three months we created an app called "My Responder," and lo and behold, today we have about 50,000 lifesavers around Singapore who can respond at any time. Now, that is innovation. It allows people to have a point of view, it allows us to test that point of view, and more importantly, it allows us to be able to recognize the fact that solving that problem is not always a traditional matter.

Jones

That's a great example. Ben, just turning to you, what are the key things other governments are doing to successfully execute digital transformation?

Chiang

Based on what I've seen on successful digital transformation projects, I think there are two things that are common and present, the first thing being commitment. And commitment comes from two groups of people, you would definitely have those two at the top, that's the first one. Visible backing from the most influential executives. Now, the second group is also important, and commitment is really from the people who must deal with the new systems, the processes, and the ways of working. And so, the question is, how do you engage them? How do you get their buy-in, and better still, how do you get them to evangelize for you? So, these are the people who have to live with the system, long after the excitement of the system commissioning has subsided. The second point that I'm seeing is KPIs, and it's about defining measurable outcomes. And these KPIs can really be tricky, right? And you need to be very careful how you structure them to get the right behaviors and outcomes. And maybe let me give you an example. If you want to break down agency silos and enhance citizen centricity, do you simply measure the number of data elements that are shared between agencies? I don't think that really solves the problem, and you may be able to get better results if you actually track the number of e-services that have pre-filled government data, so that at the end of the day, it improves data integrity and also makes it more convenient for your citizens. So, as you can see, having the right KPIs is absolutely critical to get the right outcomes.

Jones

How do the next few years look for digital government in ASEAN?

Chiang

For me, I think the next frontier is really AI, the way I see it. Artificial Intelligence will be integrated and embedded into all aspects of our lives. Now, even today, we may not even notice how much AI is around us, that's powered by algorithms and machine learning and data. We use algorithms and that determines what we see on our social media feeds, it determines which cab picks us up when we use the ride-hailing apps, it even determines which elevator comes and picks up to the next level, right? So, what's a difference and a game-changer, going forward?

I think it's going to be data, as we become a lot more digitized, as we roll out more sensors, we will have an exponential amount of data. With data, I think governments will be able to unleash the true potential of AI. And when that happens, we can then build digital twins for everything, digital patient twins for better health care and wellness, all the way to digital twins for entire cities. And we could use this for things like simulating better mobility flows, all the way to assessing the impact of climate-related events on our cities.

Jones

Thanks Ben, and turning to you Cheow Hoe, and focusing on Singapore, how do the next few years look for digital government in Singapore?

Cheow Hoe

Going forward the next couple of years, I think the challenges are humongous. We now have to tackle very difficult and very challenging problems, like health care, like transportation, like sustainability, etc. These things are really not as simple to solve, but technology seems to be the only hope if you ask me. Health care, for example, if you look at COVID, what happened in the pandemic, technology came to the front for the first time in full force. Versus, for example, SARS, maybe about 17 years ago. And going forward, I think technology will play a very important role in health care. The next one is transportation, there's no question about it, optimization, as we move more and more towards automation, etc., technology's going to be very important. And the third one, which I think we are all very concerned about is sustainability.

As Ben mentioned, data is important, our ability to use technology, to solve many of the sustainability problems, like managing zero-carbon initiatives, etc. Those things are going to be tough, but they are very meaningful, and if you can use technology and data to solve them, I think the world would become a better place.

Jones

What's the key thing that you think you've learnt about digital transformation so far?

Cheow Hoe

You know, one thing we learnt very quickly was that you’ve got to start small. The saying, “Start small, act fast, and think big.” It's actually very, very important. And we kind of demonstrated that. You've got to start small because you've got to show results. Nobody's going to believe you and invest tons of money with you unless you show results. And you cannot achieve results quickly if you don't start small. So, starting with an MVP, a minimal viable product, showing people that it can be done properly, gives people a lot of confidence that you are on the right track. So, I spoke of My Responder, the initial work that was done on My Responder was three engineers, four months. So, this is, I think, a very, very important part in leading transformation. Most of the time, people invest too much money and time in the beginning, and after a while people get jaded and lose confidence in terms of whether it would ever happen in the first place. So, if there's any advice I would give to people starting transformation, start small, act fast, think very big if you want to succeed.

Jones

Cheow Hoe, thank you.

Cheow Hoe

Thank you, Oly and Ben. You know, it's been a great experience, and there's so much we can learn from each other.

Jones

And, Ben, many thanks for joining us too.

Chiang

Thank you so much, it's been a real pleasure to be on today's podcast.

Jones

Do join us again – we’ll continue to hear from senior government and public sector leaders who are both setting, and executing, new strategies to meet today’s opportunities and challenges facing the public sector. Also, you can subscribe to this series, so you won’t miss an episode. From me Oly Jones, Chan Cheow Hoe and Benjamin Chiang, thanks for listening and see you next time.