Singapore government commits to full e-government

Singapore - an acknowledged pioneer in e-government, where 84% of citizens transacted electronically with the state at least once in 2011 - has launched an ambitious 'masterplan' to further consolidate its use of technology to support its five million citizens.

The Southeast Asian city state, which has a population of around five million, sees its eGov2015 initiative as bringing even closer integration of systems, processes and service delivery to create a form of collaborative government that 'co-creates and connects with our people'.

The masterplan, developed with input from citizenry and its public and private sectors, will how guide government agencies in the implementation of new ICT programmes in the next five years, focusing on areas like 'whole of government' transformation.

In the next few years, for example, citizens can expect new public services that will bring about greater convenience and improve customer experience when they transact with the government, while platforms will be developed to enable the private sector to co-create with the government and offer new value-added services to the public.  

In the meantime, two new websites are already up and running - Data.gov.sg, its first-stop portal for access to publicly available government data where users will be able to access more than 5,000 publicly available datasets from more than 50 public agencies, download datasets for research purposes and to create applications, as well as to search for applications that use government data, and mGov@SG, where individuals and businesses can easily search for, identify and access government m-services that can be used on their own devices.  

The Government also hopes to widen and deepen its e-engagement efforts and experiment with new ways to tap on the "wisdom and resources of [our] Netizens" via social media-based public consultation programmes. 

Singapore is also now officially committing to establish a private Government Cloud to offer shared services "in a secure and multi-tenanted environment".  

Asian countries are already regarded as being well ahead in new forms of delivery of public services, so this announcement is likely to be of great interest to policy makers internationally.