Partner the Government, Sure or Not?
About 150 Business and Information Technology (IT) leaders gathered under a marquee at a modest city hotel. They were from multi-national companies, small & medium enterprises (SMEs) and startups of various industries. Many were fierce rivals in the commercial world. But that night, they had one thing in common — as partners of the National Digital Identity (NDI) programme, they have used NDI products to offer better services for their customers while improving efficiency for their respective businesses. These leaders were there to collaborate more with the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) on the NDI initiative.
Partner the Private Sector, Can or Not?
It started in 2017, when MyInfo was the first NDI product to be piloted with the private sector. The hypothesis was that it would solve a problem common in both sectors — the filling of online forms and verification of documents. The pilot grew rapidly from two to seven banks in a few months. Businesses in other industries heard about it and asked to participate.
One, who shall remain anonymous, even called my mobile phone and loudly berated me for access sooner.
We knew immediately that if we could meet this demand, the dynamism of the private sector would complement our efforts in building digital infrastructure. Residents can then tangibly experience Smart Nation through their regular daily interactions.
How Ah… There Are How Many Companies in Singapore?
There are almost half a million private sector entities registered in Singapore. How would a small team of public service officers engage them all? The big boss correctly pointed out that the solution would not be found by engaging them more efficiently — the scale required a different approach.
Drawing inspiration from the FANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google), who grew rapidly by digitally on-boarding customers and partners from all over the world, the NDI Developer & Partner Portal was launched in 2018. On this portal, NDI technical documentation, integration tutorials, Application Programming Interface (API) sandbox, test profiles, and sample app source code are open-sourced. Any developer could access them 24/7 and start prototyping immediately. To request link-up for production access, any Singapore-registered business can simply log in with their CorpPass credentials.
What… This Workshop Must Bring Computer?
Two developers sat together crouched tightly over a notebook computer. They were troubleshooting Node.js code for calling NDI APIs within an application. They had just met, but were chatting like buddies with a shared passion for tech. One of them was a partner developer, while the other was a member of the NDI team who was coaching his counterpart. Around them, another thirty developers from partner organisations were attempting the same tutorial on their personal computers, as their “trainers” from the NDI team looked on. Almost every quarter, the NDI team organises Developer Workshops to enable developers with the technical know-how to use APIs.
These workshops all started from a stockbroking SME, who called me for help one Friday evening while I was driving home.
“Can your engineers come down to my office to teach our IT team how to do API?”, the caller pleaded repeatedly.
We knew that if we could help up-skill the developer community in the use of B2B REST APIs, this could accelerate digitalisation of the economy and NDI adoption.
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What Happens To My Link-up Request?
Link-up requests are formally submitted by businesses through the NDI Developer & Partner Portal. A typical request comprises three elements:
- Relevant data items required, picked into a “shopping cart”
- Short description of the use case
- Clear user journey diagram that adheres to guidelines
Requests that are easy to understand and comprehensive can be reviewed and approved quickly. Those that require clarifications will usually hear back from us within two weeks. Use cases in regulated industries may include consultations with sector supervisory agencies, or be aligned to licensing requirements.
The quickest integration performed by our partners, so far, was completed in six to eight weeks. That remains the time to beat.
What’s the Catch?
As a digital infrastructure, we hope that partners would find the NDI go-to-market products relevant to their operations and make use of them to digitalise their operations or create new products and services.
MyInfo, SG-Verify (for in-person verification) and QR Login (for online verification) are available now. For details, watch these videos on how SG-Verify and QR Login can work for you.
We have regular dialogues with partners to identify real work problems which we can solve together. For example, they share with us their wish lists for MyInfo verified data APIs to replace existing government documents, which they collect from customers for verification. We also work with partners to conceptualise new use cases and first-of-its-kind applications of NDI products.
To help SMEs without organic IT capabilities adopt digital, we are also partnering Software-as-Service (SaaS) providers, such as Human Resources or Finance Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, to bootstrap NDI products at the platform level. This will allow SMEs to digitalise simply by subscribing to our SaaS partners’ services.
In short, there is no catch.
Want to be a partner? Check out our Developer & Partner Portal or talk to us at https://go.gov.sg/engage-NDI.
