Speech by SMS Janil Puthucheary at STACK Developer Conference 2024

WELCOME ADDRESS BY DR JANIL PUTHUCHEARY, SENIOR MINISTER OF STATE FOR DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT AND INFORMATION & HEALTH, AND MINISTER-IN-CHARGE OF GOVTECH, AT STACK DEVELOPER CONFERENCE 2024 ON 6 NOV 2024

Celebrating 10 Years of Smart Nation

1. Good morning everyone, and welcome to STACK 2024. We launched our Smart Nation journey in 2014. Before that, we were engaged in technology-driven transformation, digitalisation, and the development of products. But 10 years ago, we brought that together under this initiative we called the Smart Nation, and we had some reasons for doing that. We had some aims and some goals. We wanted to build better lives for our citizens by driving digital transformation across three broad areas. The government needed to transform, our society was transforming, and we wanted our economy to transform.

2. We wanted to develop a digital government that made life better for our citizens, using technology. We wanted a digital society for all, for our people to be in a position to embrace the opportunities that technology would provide. And we wanted this to result in a digital economy that had thriving enterprises and created good job opportunities here in Singapore.

3. We have indeed borne fruit over the last 10 years. We do have a vibrant digital society. We have a digital economy that is growing and thriving, and creating opportunities. We have prepared Singaporeans to take advantage of these economic opportunities, and we have increased the number of tech professionals in Singapore – growing by about 25 per cent from 2018 to 2023. We had our eye on inclusivity, making sure that those who are less digitally savvy are able to adopt these new technologies and take advantage of these opportunities. Our colleagues in the SG Digital Office have trained more than 340,000 seniors to pick up digital skills for use in everyday life, using technology for their day-to-day needs.

4. Our government has transformed. We have become a government that is digital to the core. Along the way, we have developed an extensive suite of products and services that serve our citizens and make everyday activities more convenient. Today, our citizens in Singapore can transact with the government anywhere and anytime, with 99 per cent of these transactions completed online.

Developing Capabilities for Smart Nation

5. Our success factor, the reason we have been able to do this today, has been the development of new capabilities within government. Our people are a significant part of this. We have been able to engage, attract and retain excellent engineering talent within government. We have also been able to develop standardised central tools and infrastructure. This has allowed the Government Technology Agency of Singapore, or GovTech, to build high quality digital services, and empower our colleagues and partners across the rest of government to do so as well. We do not build everything ourselves – a big part of what we do is to empower the engineers and technology teams in other ministries and public sector agencies to now build more quickly and more cost effectively.

6. At the heart of all this is what this conference is named after, SG Tech Stack. This does not just allow our agencies to develop and deploy apps in an agile manner, it streamlines the process of creating digital services and provides developers within GovTech and across the Whole-of-Government with reusable components like authentication, payment and data analytics services. They do not have to re-imagine or re-engineer all of these things.

7. It has significantly enhanced the productivity of our teams and developers across the public sector. They no longer have to think about developing common infrastructure from scratch. Thus, they have been able to focus on innovation, and meeting the needs of their users, in an agile manner; doing so faster and better. One example – MyInfo. This product helps our citizens manage and access their personal data, and delivers that personal data on request, after authentication, to a variety of other entities. Essentially, it is an internal eKYC with government; a single source of truth for some of these essential information. A product of this complexity, with a need for security and reliability, normally would have taken at least a year. But because we had the Tech Stack, the common infrastructure, and because of the work that we had done, the development process only took four months.

8. The productivity gains, the cost savings, and the efficiency gains are important. Tech Stack has also resulted in a more seamless and consistent experience. The citizen experience of interacting with government through our digital services has changed.

9. An example of a commonly used tool is GovWallet. This is a digital payment module which allows access to government payouts. It is embedded within a variety of apps, for example LifeSG, which aggregates for Singaporeans a variety of government services, and Healthy365, which is for our healthcare sector. Both of these use the same payment module, GovWallet. This GovWallet suite is also being used today – you had experienced it at the event check-in, and the Swag Pack redemption will also be riding on our GovWallet module. Please try it out and tell us what does not work well, and our developers would be happy to improve it.

10. Another key thing that has driven what we have done over the last 10 years, that has allowed us to arrive at this point in 2024, is cloud computing. We developed Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC). We wanted government services to take advantage of the performance and capabilities of commercial cloud, and maintain robust cybersecurity measures.

11. As of the middle of this year, we have migrated about 78 per cent of our government systems to the cloud. This has allowed us to exploit best-in-class solutions provided by cloud platforms and scale up our digital services faster, and it has allowed us to be more cost-effective. It has also built in a certain agility and adaptability.

12. An example of how we have benefitted is our national e-learning platform. Our Ministry of Education (MOE) has a product called the Student Learning Space (SLS). During COVID-19, many of you would recall that our schools were forced to move to home-based learning. (Students) could not go to school, and we wanted to continue to deliver education at home. SLS was a platform we used to deliver this. The team was given about a week’s notice to accommodate up to 300,000 concurrent users, the entire population of (students). This was triple the number previously in pilot or beta testing. Schools were trying to look into its implementation, and we were still exploring the possibilities (then). COVID-19 struck, and we had to scale it across the entire school-going population. It was on the cloud, and thanks to the cloud-native services provided in GCC, (we had) no issues. As far as our users were concerned, the product was scaled up rapidly, (and we) delivered a smooth home-based learning experience, minimising the disruption to our students’ education during a very trying period.

13. It was not something that was top of mind, as we were worrying about masks, vaccines and hospitals. But it means that now, many years later, we did not have to deal with the long-tail of disruption to the education of our children.

Refreshing our Smart Nation Vision

14. We have made significant progress in using technology to improve the lives of Singaporeans. We cannot stop there. (Everyone in) this room certainly knows the landscape is changing very rapidly. New technologies are here, just over the horizon. These bring new opportunities, and allow us to dream big about what new products and services we can deliver. But they also bring new challenges – online harms, misinformation, and scams. They result in significant distress, financial losses, and they erode trust in our products and the providers of those products. We have to deal with that erosion of trust, and shore up that trust instead.

15. (There are) Other types of disruptions (too) – artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (gen-AI). A big part of the discourse has not just been about job displacements, but also displacement of firms, business models, disruption to the value chains that people have built up over the decades. So, we then need to think about reskilling the workers, and having the firms innovate faster and use technology for reskilling and innovation.

16. There are concerns about the way in which technology plays a role in exacerbating issues such as isolation, mental health challenges, the possibility of digital exclusion, and all of these potentially coming together to weaken our social fabric.

17. These are new challenges that we need to think about. In 2024, it is not just about how to encourage the further uptake of technology, when you have the internet penetration that we have, (and) when you have the mobile phone penetration that we have, we have to shift our thinking to a qualitative approach. How do we then shape the use of digital technology, the behaviour and the experience? We recently refreshed our Smart Nation vision. We launched Smart Nation 2.0 and refreshed our goals. We are shifting towards a qualitative approach around three core goals:

a. Trust; so that Singaporeans can go online with confidence, knowing that the digital systems that they engage with, the transactions that they are carrying out, and the interactions that they are participating in, are reliable and secure, and can be trusted.

b. Growth; with technology developing our economy and business opportunities, we also want personal growth to be part of the story. We want our people to enhance their skills and capture new opportunities.

c. Community; we need to make a deliberate effort to use technology to strengthen our social ties, foster inclusivity and build a stronger society.

Upgrading our Capabilities for Smart Nation 2.0

18. Doing all these will require us to develop new capabilities. We will capitalise on emerging technologies, and we will have to understand and meet the evolving needs of our citizens. Like the theme of today’s conference, we will need to supercharge ourselves. Our digital engineering needs to be supercharged, not just in productivity but also in quality.

19. We are deepening our capabilities, including in AI, where new innovations and breakthroughs are happening every day. We are driving AI adoption, which will boost the productivity of our public officers across the Whole-of-Government quite significantly. We want to automate routine or repetitive processes, and focus on more complex and creative tasks.

20. AI has been a force multiplier in our efforts against scams. It has proven to be an effective tool. We have been able to proactively identify and disrupt harmful websites at scale. GovTech has a recursive Machine Learning Site Evaluator (rMSE), a tool that can evaluate hundreds of thousands of suspicious sites a day with an accuracy rate of over 90 per cent. We work with the Singapore Police Force, using rMSE to detect scam websites. We then engage our local Internet Service Providers to examine and take down these (malicious) sites, and block them if necessary.

21. Many other agencies in government are also adopting AI to provide higher-quality, better and more efficient digital services. GovTech allows these other agencies within the public sector to source for the best possible solutions. We play a role around the central infrastructure and tech stack, and we will lean in to help our colleagues across the Whole-of-Government do more and do better with AI digital tools.

22. As we do so, we will engage the private sector as well. Last year, we partnered with Google to launch AI Trailblazers on GCC. Trailblazers provide government agencies and Singapore-based companies with access to Google’s AI stack, building generative AI solutions for real-world challenges. For users with limited skills, and colleagues across the Government who are not part of the engineering core at GovTech, the stack offers no-code AI developer tools to help them quickly build chatbots or enterprise search functionalities into their systems. More experienced practitioners can capitalise on pre-trained generative AI models as well as AI-optimised computing infrastructure to tailor models for specific use cases.

23. We will play a role in uplifting the competencies and capabilities of our public officers in AI through structured training programmes and hackathons. GovTech has a Digital Academy, which is currently piloting an AI (Champions) Bootcamp to provide officers with hands-on experience developing proof-of-concept solutions using gen-AI.

24. As we do all these, we have to make sure we keep an eye on accessibility and inclusivity. The original intent that everyone should benefit from our efforts, has not changed. We have to continue to develop tools and processes to make sure we help the Whole-of-Government meet the needs of all Singaporeans. We have developed a tool called Oobee, a web accessibility testing tool, to help developers detect and rectify accessibility issues, which could otherwise prevent people with disabilities (PWDs) from accessing what have now become essential content and features. Oobee has facilitated the discovery of more than 11.5 million accessibility issues over nearly 800,000 pages since July 2023.

Partnering our People for Success

25. As we increase our capabilities and upgrade our products and services, we must ensure to strengthen our partnerships with citizens, businesses and other stakeholders. We need to advance our capabilities together, and co-create new solutions together. This is not new; and we have continued to do so even as we refresh our Smart Nation vision, focusing on Trust, Community and Growth.

26. First, we are collaborating with leading industry players (in our digital ecosystems) to mitigate online harms and collectively build a safer and more trusted digital space. Our Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) has partnered with Google to create a fraud protection feature under Google Play Store for all Android devices in Singapore. This blocks high-risk apps from being downloaded outside the official app stores, protecting users against malware-enabled scams. In the last six months, this approach has successfully blocked nearly 900,000 attempts to install high-risk apps.

27. Second, we are partnering our enterprises and workers to deepen their understanding of new technologies like AI, and to equip them with the necessary expertise and resources to take advantage of the best-in-class technologies. For businesses, the government is establishing multiple AI sectoral centres of excellence. We are starting with the manufacturing sector in September, to help firms develop AI solutions tailored to their use cases, in collaboration with the research community. At the same time, we are working directly with workers to help them acquire in-demand tech skills through training programmes like the TechSkills Accelerator Programme by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). The programme has been very effective in helping workers adapt to the tech skills needed today and the anticipated demand in the near future.

28. Finally, we are working with the wider developer community, making sure that the diverse needs of citizens are addressed. This year, we held the inaugural Co-Creation Lab at A11y (“AL-eye”) Week in May. We brought together developers and members of the vulnerable communities. Their numbers may not be great, but their needs are very diverse. It was a valuable opportunity for product teams to work directly with these vulnerable users, hear their issues and address their considerations, and embed their thinking in their product development process.

Conclusion

29. Many of these things (I mentioned) became possible because we put in a lot of effort around our Tech Stack, and I have had the privilege of working with excellent colleagues who have been working on many of the challenges that I described. I want to thank everybody for their enthusiasm. The success of an event like STACK is because of the community of practitioners that turn up with a shared interest in tech for public good. Since our first conference in 2018, STACK has grown from strength to strength, increasing in number, deepening in quality, broadening in the areas of interest. I wish you all a great conference over the next two days. I hope that this year’s conference will allow you to form new partnerships and generate new ideas to help us take Smart Nation forward. Thank you.