New agency for digital projects will speed up, defend Smart Nation

THE setting up of a ministerial-level committee, under the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), to oversee Singapore's digitalisation efforts as well as the building out of the country's Smart Nation infrastructure projects, will streamline implementation.

As individual projects have been rolled out, such as e-identity, e-payments as well as efforts to build an islandwide wireless sensor network, it has become apparent that there is not only some overlap but that cybersecurity of the entire network needs to be looked at from a holistic point of view. Security cannot be slapped on to the system later, it has to be built into it from ground up.

Till now, various different government departments, such as the Digital Government Directorate of the Ministry of Finance (MOF), the Government Technology Policy department in the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) and the Smart Nation Programme Office (SNPO) in the PMO were all involved, one way or another, in planning and rolling out various digital initiatives. Added to this the Government Technology Agency (GovTech), a statutory board under MCI and responsible for government infrastructure, had its own set of projects. Under the new arrangement, the different agencies under MOF, MCI and the PMO have been rolled into one entity, Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO). This entity and GovTech together will now form the Smart Nation and Digital Government Group (SNDGG) which will be under the PMO and start functioning from May 1, 2017. This single unit, SNDGG, will not only devise various digital initiatives, it will also have the expertise to roll them out in a time bound manner via GovTech's 1,800 crack team. With a ministerial committee, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean, overseeing the SNDGG, there will far better coordination.