Government to spend S$3.8b in ICT in FY2022; 80% of contracts open to SMEs

THE government will spend S$3.8 billion on infocommunications technology (ICT) procurement this year, with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) able to participate in close to 80 per cent of the potential opportunities, the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) announced on Friday (Jun 10). This year’s sum is a similar level of spending to FY2021, when projected ICT spending was also S$3.8 billion. The government has invested about S$12.6 billion in ICT over the last 4 years. Almost 70 per cent - or S$2.6 billion - of this year’s spending will go towards application development to build new applications and upgrade existing ones. The value of projects adopting emerging technologies such as machine learning, sensors, the Internet of Things and data science will more than double from S$0.79 billion in FY2021 to S$2 billion this year, GovTech said.

Kok Ping Soon, chief executive of GovTech, said at the agency’s Smart Nation and Digital Government Industry Briefing 2022: “These investments will go into our continued efforts in re-engineering the government’s backend, humanising the government’s frontend, and deepening the industry partnerships we have.”

For one thing, GovTech is working with the Ministry of Education to implement a smart facility management system in all schools to improve energy and water efficiency. When ready, this system will be able to monitor utility consumption, increase labour productivity by automating facilities management processes, as well as collect data for improving maintenance, it said. Meanwhile, about S$1 billion in procurement opportunities has been set aside for projects to be developed on the government commercial cloud. GovTech noted that deploying applications on the cloud has helped government ICT infrastructure become more agile and resilient, and accrued average cost savings of between 30 and 40 per cent for each system migrated to the cloud.  The government’s goal of having 70 per cent of eligible government systems on the cloud by 2023 is “within reach”, with about 55 per cent of systems migrated since October 2018, it added. In addition, about 27 per cent - or S$1.04 billion worth - of projects are set to be co-developed with industry, up from 20 per cent in FY2021. Bulk tenders have facilitated closer collaboration with industry partners, who have become familiar with the government’s common platforms and can work alongside government developers to build applications “efficiently”, GovTech said. For outsourced projects, the agency also expects an increased proportion to be built on and utilise its Singapore Government Technology Stack (SGTS). The SGTS is a set of platform tools developed by GovTech that streamlines and simplifies the development process, and enables code reuse across public agencies. Technical assessment requirements for ICT tenders will also be progressively included as part of the evaluation process, GovTech said. 

These assessments can take the form of coding tests and scenario-based tasks “to provide an objective framework to assess the capabilities of vendors’ technical teams”, it said. Such assessments will be tagged to individuals instead of companies, and have a validity period of 3 years. Currently, the assessment of vendors’ capabilities is based on CVs and relevant professional certifications. This may not objectively reflect the competency of teams involved, GovTech noted.