Speaking at the 20th Annual GovCC Summit at ParkRoyal, the MF CIO of GovTech Singapore, Sharon Ng spoke to the digital journey her organisation has been on to digitise their citizen experience and the importance of creating an agile organisation from the top down.

She spoke to how the pace of change is accelerating for government, requiring companies to pivot quickly and lead digital transformation initiatives. The challenges involved include, shifting internal mindset, approaches and skills.

There are 4 key areas GovTech Singapore remain focused towards:

• Creating “wow” experiences for citizens
• Digitisation through online portals and self service platforms
• Agile innovation by understanding customer needs
• Driving cultural change

According to Sharon, agility cannot happen in an organisation without the full organisation on board. This includes having an agile framework that sees agile digital deployment, operations, customer service enquiries, and even agile procurement processes.

“You need to be agile through and through,” says Sharon. “This including building to scale, and also building to last.”

“Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”

According to Sharon, the only way to improve your overall culture is to operationalise it from the top down. “Having a growth mindset is how you fix culture. It’s about small fixes as years progress,” she says.

The challenges they faced when driving digital transformation was that they were siloed in data. To innovate and adopt new processes, data needs to be shared across all departments, which is what the ended up doing.

“Sharing data helps you adopt new ways to create innovation and understand the citizen’s problem from the beginning,” she says.

When asked how to raise digital competencies, she says the focus needs to be: Smart small, learn fast and scale.