Sense: A Companion for the Singapore Public Service Policy Maker
Picture this.
You’re a policy maker. It’s about time to review the entire landscape of subsidies and re-size the national savings contribution limits. This could potentially affect millions of Singaporeans.
This better be data-driven.
You get to work immediately, and you come up with an excellent policy draft after a few days of brainstorming. But you turn to your team and ask for the data, held in systems. You soon realise that you’ll have to spend about a week clarifying your policy requirements and definitions with a team of data engineers, so that they can prepare and extract the data for you.
And that’s just round one.
The data’s prepared. Great. Now you’ve got to get your hands dirty and analyse the data yourself. That’d be fine if it was a simple Excel file — who couldn’t deal with Excel files. But you stare at the giant 2 GB files looming at you on your laptop screen.
No way Excel’s going to cut it. Better get a data analyst with SQL or Python skills to help you.
You’re done with your analysis! Awesome. You prepare for your presentation to Senior Management. Guess what? Old assumptions are challenged, new assumptions are made. All par for the course.
But poor you. The cycle starts all over again.
Policy is hard work.
For those of you who are policy officers like I am, the situation above is far too familiar. What onlookers think would be a simple affair of a few days, actually takes far longer. Think months, or half a year, for a policy team to re-iterate and re-compute critical calculations for important national policies.
A closer look at the situation above reveals a few key problems:
- Lack of Control. For the most part, it’s waiting, and enlisting data engineers and analysts to translate your requirements into actual calculation algorithms and simulations — but you’re the one with the domain knowledge, not them.
- Endless Coordination. Incentives are simply not aligned for the data engineer or analyst to understand your policy from the get go (or maybe your policy is just too complex), so you incur a huge coordination overhead trying to explain the nuances of the calculations required.
- High Technical Barrier. Making policy shouldn’t have to be so difficult. Well, not so technically difficult, at least. Who would have thought one would have needed to learn Python or SQL just to create good national policy? Hats off to all those policy analysts out there in the Singapore government.
But we can make it easier.
That’s why Aniruddha, Wilson and I came up with Sense, a whole-of-government business intelligence tool that brings your data closer to you. Imagine an intuitive chat interface, where you just login and go “Hey, tell me how the affordability gap has changed for our services across the past 10 years!”, and an AI agent does all the calculations for you.
And that’s just one of the many features. After all, policy making isn’t just calculations.
Sounds too good to be true? Watch the video below for our product demonstration:
Sense will be more than a chat interface. The team has planned for many more exciting features that will make it an excellent end-to-end tool for all your policy analysis needs. But for now, we’re excited to showcase this marvel of a LLM application that has found a good product market fit.
Here are three characteristics of Sense worth knowing:
- Sense understands your policy language. Every single iota. Not wanting to explain complicated policy definitions? We’ve built in ways for you to help Sense make sense of it all. If you’re a season user, Sense is more than capable of turning your high-level queries into key business and policy insights.
- Sense brainstorms for you. Always wanted a sparring partner? Look no further — Sense kickstarts your policy analysis with suggestions. All you have got to do, is to ask.
- Sense manages your metadata and data catalogue for you. Gone are those days when you had to turn to numerous system analysts for help, just to know what was inside your database.
This is a pre-launch article, and we’ll be rolling Sense out to the Singapore public service some time in July 2024. We’ll be bringing many more features to the service, and we’ll be approaching government agencies soon to test out our new product.
Say goodbye to endless waiting and poring over tables. Policy making can (at least technically) be as easy as 1–2–3.
