How the Singapore Government is Building Agility to Enhance Citizen Services with IMDA’s Tech Acceleration Lab and the Government Commercial Cloud+

Supply chain disruption. Pandemics and medical crises. Climate change. Events that were once “black swans” are now near-everyday occurrences for citizens worldwide—and governments are facing growing pressure to provide effective public services in response.

In the past, the ability to access, process, and apply data to make informed decisions about complex issues was crucial to creating effective public services. While this is still true, today’s unpredictable challenges and evolving citizen needs require agencies to be even quicker and more agile. Time-to-insight needs to speed up from months to days—or even minutes.

This is where technologies like real-time data streaming and initiatives such as Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA’s) Tech Acceleration Lab (TAL) come into play, bringing key insights directly to civil servants and enabling the development of more impactful and responsive public services.

TAL brings together government departments and tech innovators to evaluate and test new technologies, simplify deployment, reduce learning curves, and create a conducive testing environment for innovative solutions like data streaming. TAL facilitates seamless onboarding of test cases for government entities onto Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC) infrastructure.

Confluent Cloud onboarded with TAL in 2023, so government agencies can now benefit from the best in data streaming technologies. They can work within a controlled test sandbox on GCC to test, develop, and deploy solutions—a crucial process for developing public services that adapt to today’s unpredictable challenges.

Enhancing Public Service With a Modern Approach to Data

As an IMDA-accredited company, Confluent is among a panel of partners that are considered first in the Singapore government’s streamlined procurement process. Public and private sector organizations can now access innovative products like Confluent Cloud, providing government agencies with the tools they need to harness real-time data for public good.

Many organizations across the private and public sectors, such as Singapore’s Housing & Development Board (HDB), are already working with Confluent to modernize their approach to data and enhance end-user engagement with data streaming. Here’s how they’re getting started.

Modernizing and Revitalizing Data Infrastructure

Many public service organizations are tasked with handling decades’ worth of legacy data, which often lives in silos across old and new infrastructures. As a result, they face challenges with slow data processing, fragmented ownership of data, and data quality—preventing them from working with data in real time.

While migrating to newer architectures and infrastructure is the clear path to overcoming these issues, transporting a large volume of sensitive data to a new environment can be challenging—and more importantly, it can disrupt citizen services.

Through the IMDA Accreditation program, Confluent helps many organizations modernize their data infrastructures with a fully managed or self-managed Apache Kafka® service that allows for seamless, real-time data streaming across all cloud and on-premises environments.

HDB was able to modernize its existing datastore with a data streaming platform, allowing real-time interoperability between modern and legacy systems as it confidently migrated to the cloud. This enabled HDB to better analyze usage and trends to make informed planning decisions for future development and planning— in addition to providing residents with a more seamless experience when interacting with the board.

Enhancing Agility, Responsiveness, and Security

With a modern data infrastructure in place, an organization can build more scalable, fault-tolerant, and real-time data pipelines, setting data in motion to empower employees with high-quality, real-time data that’s crucial for making more informed decisions—increasing agility all around.

Leaders from the private sector, such as Trust Bank, have set their data in motion with Confluent’s data streaming technologies. Confluent’s event-driven architecture enables Trust Bank’s teams to produce, share, and consume self-service data products across functions. Thanks to the customer data shared across the organization, Trust Bank’s marketing team was able to harness insights generated by other teams to build customizable notifications that enhanced user engagement.

Confluent is helping another Singapore government agency develop a similar real-time data pipeline to set its data in motion. With real-time data at their fingertips, the teams developed mobile apps that can process citizen requests in real time, reducing notifications from days to seconds.

As organizations move toward using newer technologies like data streaming, they must also ensure that the tools they’ve always used keep the security and safety of end users paramount.

This is why Confluent is working closely with cybersecurity vendors across Singapore to integrate data streaming with cybersecurity tools and to co-develop a cybersecurity blueprint for industry-wide adoption.

Evolving Partnerships, Supported by Real-Time Data, Is the Path to More Agile and Responsive Public Services

As citizen needs continuously evolve, the public sector will need to overcome new challenges. Real-time data streaming and Confluent’s partnership with Singapore’s public sector through TAL and GCC will be crucial in helping agencies modernize their data infrastructures. The ability to stream data from everywhere to anywhere—while enhancing security, speed, and reliability—ensures that Singapore’s government agencies can continue to develop innovations that benefit both citizens and public servants. With agile solutions, this can ultimately deliver more responsive services to citizens.

Discover how Confluent is helping public sector customers transform their services:

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