Centre of excellence to be set up for developing new e-Services

The government is assembling a team of IT experts and engineers who will be on call to develop digital services to better meet citizens' diverse needs and expectations as Singapore moves on the road to becoming a smart nation.

To be launched by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) by mid-July, the new Software Design and Development Centre of Excellence (CoE) will allow the development of a strong core of coders and engineers capable of creating IT solutions within the Government. The team will be housed in a 13,000 sq ft research and testing lab at the Sandcrawler, Lucasfilm's Singapore campus at Fusionopolis. It will provide facilities for user research and experience testing and consultancy services to government agencies to deliver citizen-centric digital services.

Announcing this on Thursday, Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister of Communications and Information, noted that as more citizens connect to the internet, the government needs to ensure that e-Services can offer citizens the most user-friendly and optimally-designed experience in a high-tech and seamless Smart Nation. "To achieve this, we need to create a one-stop centre where expertise in developing e-Services of such calibre is concentrated, and supported by research and analytics of data that is captured by our Smart Nation infrastructure."