Central Tools (S'pore Govt)
Questions You'll Answer
What are the trade-offs between Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service in a govt context?
What are the mainstays of the WOG (Whole-of-Government) technical stack?
How can we leverage central AI tools like Pair, AI Bots, Launchpad?
What specific variants of M365, SG-Teams, SGDCS, Sharepoint, ServiceNow ITSM does GovTech deploy?
What common applications exist for visitor and asset management so we don't build them from scratch?
How is HR administration handled centrally (HRPS, Workpal)?
What You'll Learn
Don't dump money recreating stuff already developed
See how far we are behind everyone else
Overcome the 'Not Invented Here' syndrome and misguided uniqueness
Hard Truths
If we think about the public sector as a single organization, it makes sense to use the same tech stack for efficiency, cost savings, knowledge management.
Too many people want to build their platforms/systems/tools without considering the long tail that comes with their own development. The ROI would be stacked in favor of central tools given the cost and effort advantages.
People don't know enough or don't bother to find out about the central tools on offer (or perhaps sometimes it's still work in progress). So they go do their own stuff, which then duplicates development work and wastes resources at the aggregate level.
Or sometimes people just think they've a superior product than what is already being offered centrally.
People in organizations think they have very unique requirements and processes that cannot fit off-the-shelf or central products, but these often are because of inflexibility (i.e. no process reengineering or thinking out of the box) or human stubbornness.
On the other hand, inefficiency and mismanagement at the central level will snowball, as every additional/unnecessary thing that's provisioned gets multiplied by every officer.