It has been just over six years since the Singapore government began to look at technology differently. For Chan Cheow Hoe, Singapore government's chief digital technology officer, he believes it has delivered some significant -- and positive -- changes so far.
"IT was very much just a small support base for what government does," he said, but these days technology has become "front and centre and not just play backstage as far as government is concerned".
As a testament to that, the IT team within the Singapore government has grown from just seven people to a group of 800 engineers and developers over that period.
At the same time, the Singapore government is ploughing at its plans to transition 70% of workloads to the commercial cloud[1].
Chan, who also concurrently serves as the deputy chief executive of the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech), said the government's decision to shift to a commercial cloud was sparked by the realisation that monolithic and vertically built systems did not cater to citizens.
"The sad thing is that government was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on huge projects of system integrators, and many of these projects were failing quite badly in terms of delivery, quality, and time to market," Chan said, speaking during the digital Gartner 2020 IT Symposium/XPO APAC last week.
Chan believes the transition to the cloud was made possible partly by the shift in how government classifies data.
"For the longest time, most government classification systems have been based on national security … but the same system has been used by government to classify everything else, and that's where the problem starts," he said.
"You realise that actually most of government data do not