Smart Nation, Industry 4.0 & Other Government Proverbs
Finding an answer to the complex through the everyday
Views expressed here are strictly my own and do not constitute an official statement of any sort
With the private hire vehicle app still displaying five more minutes till my ride, a car that just pulled in gave a short honk that somehow sounded a lot like “don’t need check lah, it’s me”. I checked the number plate anyway and found my honk intuition to be healthy. And just like that I began my journey home — apparently still five minutes away from where I was.
As the roads became increasingly familiar, I began to count the minutes till I could hit the bed for my usual weekend sleep-in.
And then it happened. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a green light turn to orange. Then red. Then we came to a halt.
The driver sighed. Annoyed at my rudely postponed bedtime, I looked up to join my driver in mentally persecuting the perpetrator coming from the side-roads.
But there was no one.
There we were at an empty cross junction, waiting for non-existent traffic to pass us by. A thought flashed through my mind: “smart nation sia”. Followed quickly by another question: what is this ‘smart’ nation we keep talking about?
‘Smart’?
It’s fun to interrogate people’s intellect for nuggets of knowledge or wisdom to reverse engineer and use in my own life. One question I find fascinating to ask at ‘smart’ events to smart people talking about ‘smart’ cities is: “what’s ‘smart’ to you?”
Go ahead, try it yourself. I’ll be here waiting.
If you’re like me or those I’ve asked, you’d probably have started off pretty confidently – “eh, I got study one ok” – and then as quickly as we started, would come to that sheepish Singaporean smile that‘s best described as the yāh hór i dunno lēh smile.
So why are we talking about ‘smart’ when most of us can’t easily define an outcome we have in mind? I’ve had my share of mental skirmishes with it, and I still wouldn’t say I have something resembling an answer. And shame on me, I’m supposedly on the inside of the horse’s mouth.
But that red light at a junction with no other cars in sight made me think. What if we first considered what’s not smart about Singapore?
I Not Stupid
As a nation, we’ve never really been obsessed with being ‘smart’ till somewhat recently. We fought our way from third world to first through hard work, discipline and grit. And then in the 90s, being ‘smart’ became a thing. Work smart, not hard, they said.
And then this happened in the early 2000s:
Such was our desire to be smarter that we even have a nationally celebrated movie that goes by the name of I Not Stupid. It’s not a suggestion, it doesn’t ask for opinions, it’s simply a declaration of: I Not Stupid. It’s even slightly defiant and rebellious if you say it with a certain disdain for authority.
Given our national history of defying the odds, instead of asking ourselves what’s ‘smart’, would thinking about ‘smart nation’ as ‘I not stupid nation’ help?
What would ‘stupid’ look like then?
Relating back to what I had just experienced on my private hire ride back:
- The app was pretty ‘stupid’. A stable internet connection is kind of a universal commodity in Singapore, yet the app still couldn’t let me know how long it’d be before my driver arrived. It was still supposedly along the expressway when it honked at me.
- The traffic light behaviour was kind of ‘stupid’ too. Why turn red when there’s no traffic coming from the adjacent sides and delay cars on the main road? First world problem maybe, but was it smart? I don’t think so.
While these might seem like unreasonable, typical, everyday grouses by an everyday local like me, I contend that it has everything to do with what we should be considering when it comes to moving towards a Smart Nation, Industry 4.0, and all those other government proverbs we need no further introductions to.
Becoming Smarter
How does a city become ‘smarter’?
Having services that actually did well at what they were supposed to (tell me how near my driver is accurately in my instance) and traffic-aware road junction lights would be a good start.
And what do these have in common?
If they had worked as expected – I wouldn’t have noticed anything.
This made me think deeper into what else becoming less stupid might mean. Does moulding a ‘smart’ city necessarily mean having e-services? Does it necessarily mean new technologies? Of what use are these new technologies to me if I’m still unable to fulfil my intentions in my interaction with the government and what’s within their control?
What if becoming smarter was simply a matter of improving the everyday experience of our inhabitants? By the very definition of everyday, it implies that people not notice they were even doing something ‘smart’. Is a ‘smart’ city inherently unnoticeable by its own inhabitants?
Perhaps the answer to becoming ‘smart’ is actually less glamourous than what it seems to be. Perhaps when considering what ‘smart’ is, we should be going back to the root cause of why we desire to be smarter. Or less stupid.
In my instance, having things that just worked, would have been nice, and would have already necessitated my everyday environment to be smart about things.
But obviously that isn’t a simple affair, is it?
Having things that just work
If Apple used to be known for just one thing, it was that you could pick at random any of their products, and it would do what it was supposed to – and excel at it. You wouldn’t even notice you were having a great experience until you switched to a generic MP3 player, an Android, or a Windows PC.
While that no longer holds very strongly since the demise of Steve Jobs, the rise and fall of Apple does provide us with some lessons and an achievable ideal we could work towards.
Rethinking Our Approach To Creating Services
E-Services sound good on paper: “We’ve digitalised your experience!” But consider: what’s in it for the end user? Blindly digitalising existing solutions isn’t a good idea, mainly because we also digitalise the existing problems. Case in point: While previously a form was filled up with pen and paper, now the same is done via a computer; But it’s still that same long and tedious form that has to be filled up! So…
What’s the difference?
Having things to just work involves design – something Apple had a laser focus on during its prime.
Designing better interactions with citizens/users is all a matter of asking what difference we are making for them. It involves a deeper consideration of why that service exists, what’s the intention of end-users when they have to access the service, and what can be done to reduce the cost (time/money/effort) needed to fulfil the intention.
We need to shift our focus from headlining (“our department digitalised Service X”) to actual user benefits (“our users spent Y minutes less to achieve Z through digitalisation”).
But that opens a new can of worms, because how can we know a user took Y minutes less?
Data Driven Design & Engineering
While Apple’s amazing user experience could be attributed to its design-first approach of creating products, we mostly forget that it was also extremely fortunate to have a visionary that was right about most things as its leader. And let’s just admit that it’s not every day we find such leaders.
Since we can’t assume we will have visionary leaders who also happen to be incredibly intuitive about user wants/needs, how else can we navigate to a better guess at what users desire?
We need to rely on data.
And data collation is what Industry 4.0 is all about – the collection of data at scale from the automation we’ve achieved with Industry 3.0, and more importantly, it’s meaningful interpretation which will allow us to make a better guess at what services need to start existing and how existing services can be improved.
To achieve this, we need to shift our focus from visionary design (“this will be great for users!”) to data driven design (“80% of users demonstrated X behaviour, we could cut Y minutes by altering Z”).
That also means we need to have the people with the capabilities to implement the collection of data accurately at scale, the people with the capabilities to meaningfully interpret that data, and the people who can make changes to our systems.
Do we have them?
Changing Our Workforce Culture
If there’s one thing Singapore is known for, it’s our pragmatism. We’re so practical we’re willing to forgo what others see as ‘human rights’ (whatever that means), for economic growth. We’re so practical that we realised decades ago it’s easier, cheaper, and less risky to outsource our needed expertise to others.
Why bother hiring a team of experts when you could have one manager who could liaise with experts from abroad to deliver a product or service? This practicality has resulted in a nation of managers without deep expertise and experience in a domain.
But why’s that a problem you may be wondering? Consider this if you’re a local/have been around for awhile in Singapore: how many other locals in their 30s–40s do you know of that are still doing the groundwork and have become experts in their fields? And if they are still doing so, what’s their social status like compared to others who have ‘progressed’ on to management?
It’s almost a social stigma of sorts now to be doing groundwork when you’re in your 40s here. And it’s not unjustified. A project manager in IT gets an average annual salary of S$84,370 (S$45,675 — S$149,398) while an engineer in IT gets only S$51,501 (S$32,860 — S$93,492).
As we’re being thrown head-first into Industry 4.0, we’ll be challenged with the need for expertise, specifically that of engineering, design, and data. If we are to be ‘smarter’ than others, we’ll need to solve problems that few others have solved or even thought about before. We need to be able to create new experiences that work – a necessary collaboration between engineering and design. And we need to know how these things that work can be optimised — through data.
We need to re-align our ideals of work from one of delivery (“how much can you do in a week?”) to one of innovation (“what problem can you/would you like to solve?”), and we need to value expertise accordingly.
However, that’s easier said than done given our deep seated cultural issues with management vs engineering.
Creating A Safe Space For Expertise To Grow
Through continued cultural reinforcement that managing projects are more highly valued than solving problems, we’ve created an unsafe space for expertise to grow. It’s almost a given that local engineers will transit to management once in their late thirties, laying waste to the years of experience they have in actually solving problems.
A culture of outsourcing and emphasis on management communicates to the workforce that problem solvers are of less value than managers. And what would a smart person do when faced with a market without space for them to solve problems?
They find other places to solve problems of course.
Why would I work for an IT consulting company here that churns out monotonous business applications for clients when I could be at Facebook or Google changing the world? And get paid a lot more while at it.
In order to expand our collective expertise, we need to start valuing our problem solvers. One way we can do this — and also the reason Government Digital Services exists — is through in-housing of engineering capabilities.
While development of government products were previously outsourced, we’ve realised that relying on vendors to get the job done often resulted in products and services that might be misaligned to what our city-state needs. Changing our model from vendor reliance (outsourcing) to vendor augmentation (bringing in expertise from the private sector to build services alongside our own problem solvers), has resulted in products that were more nimble to changes and consequentially fitting of our city’s unique problem domains.
Some examples of products we’ve done that would only make sense to be done by us (Singapore) are:
- Business Grants Portal — which other nation gives out grants like Singapore?
- MyCareersFuture — which other nation offers financial schemes to support citizens’ career switch/advancement efforts?
- WOGAA — which other nation has enough e-services to require its own analytics platform across intranet and internet?
- Parents Gateway — which other nation has (almost) all schools unified under a single Ministry of Education?
I could go on, but I’d be bragging about how we solved our #firstworldproblems.
In Summary
Moulding a ‘smart’ city should be all about improving the everyday experience, and this means getting things to work at a very fundamental level for the majority of users and use cases. We need to:
- Design services with a user-benefits-driven approach over being headline/buzzword friendly
- Rely more on data and less on opinions to make decisions
- Focus on actual problem solving over perception management and progress signalling
- Provide a safe space for problem solvers to shine
Which brings us to the bigger picture where private sector and public sector cannot afford to be disparate — Industry 4.0.
Towards Industry 4.0
Why would it matter if my private hire vehicle showed up on time according to the app but every traffic light was red even without traffic?
On paper, Industry 4.0 is about the collection and usage of data from automation we gained in Industry 3.0, enabling us to have increasingly autonomous self-adjusting systems. However if we fail to translate these tech-sheet features into real world benefits for our end-users – customer or citizens alike – we will fail to convince our society that there exists a better life ahead of us if everyone is willing to do their part in this shift that’s crucial for Singapore, a city state with little to no resources to speak of.
Improving Ability
Industry 4.0 brings to us many challenges to solve. Collecting data at scale and making sense of it well enough to make business decisions is still a difficult affair for most. To complicate matters, it’s a hard problem to normalise data across organisations, with each having their own set of collected data and corresponding ways of using it.
Instrumenting your data collection and analysis requires technical expertise, which is what we need to focus on in order to continue delivering products and services that helps, not hinders, users in the future.
Ask: Are you already collecting data in your organisation’s problem domain? Can your organisation interpret that data?
Improving Interoperability
Few organisations locally will have enough data to make sense of their problem domain in completeness. Collaboration between organisations in terms of data sharing needs to happen in order to reap the benefits that Industry 4.0 promises.
Moving forward, we will need to overcome the challenge of needing to both share our data in ways others can understand, as well as consume the data of others and make sense of it for our own context.
Ask: Is your data understandable by others? Can you integrate the data of other organisations to augment your own?
Improving Agility
We could have all the data in the world, but if we cannot respond to what the data is telling us, we might as well not have that data.
In light of the world becoming increasingly connected and with the emergence of new patterns of problems to be solved, keeping products and services nimble to change will be important to translate this Industry 4.0 tech-sheet into user benefits.
Ask: How much effort does it take to respond to your data? Do your processes facilitate or discourage change?
Designing For Experiences
Improving the everyday is all about creating awesome experiences for users. To move our society forward as a whole, we need to look beyond just the latest technologies, and to question how/if it improves the everyday experience of our users.
Data enables this, but we have to be willing to let ourselves be guided by it, for the end-goal of improving users’ experience while interacting with our services.
Ask: How are you using your data? Is your solution shaped by the data, or does your solution shape the data?
The Evolving Roles Of Private/Public Sectors
Lastly, in order for a Smart Nation to happen, both the private and public sector has to move forward together with citizens, and it’s a delicate balance to maintain.
An overly advanced government deprives the private sector of business opportunities and talent, and conversely, an overly advanced private sector will probably not want to do business in a city without a ready market for it, or if the city is not aligned with its vision of what the future looks like.
As we move forward, the boundary of what belongs to government and what belongs to business will be challenged, and being ‘smart’ about this would be a matter of how well we can differentiate between what profits society as a whole and what profits individuals/businesses.
For example during the product conceptualisation of MyCareersFuture, we had a dilemma. As individuals, we wanted to create an end-all jobs platform for our city — there’s pride in being the best out there. However, where would that leave businesses such as Indeed or JobStreet?
Eventually we came to a decision to have a laser focus on the demographic that needed it the most, which in our case was professionals, managers, executives, and technicians (PMETs) in the later stages of their careers who were no longer considered competitive by the private market.
Unemployment is a big deal in any developed nation, and by deciding to only provide assistance to those who needed it, we hoped that this was a move which would profit society without causing loss to the private sector.
Cheers! (The End)
With all of that, I hope I’ve inspired you to think more about your place in our move towards being ‘smart’/less ‘stupid’— whatever that means to you and the organisation you represent.
If you’re a profit driven business: How effectively are you solving problems? What data do you have to justify that? What value are you bringing to your customers? How could you improve that?
If you’re part of the government, additionally: Has a citizen slept soundly at night because of work you’ve done? Was there one complain less about something that didn’t make sense because of a change you made/initiated?
Without a shared understanding amongst end-user/citizens, businesses, and government, and how our everyday lives will and can be improved, then… be smart for what?
Cheers 🤓
If you liked what you just read, consider giving some applause so I get feedback on what I write. Also, consider following the Government Digital Services publication/me for more stuff like this(:
Oh, and we’re also hiring for product capabilities such as experience designing, software engineering, and software operations. If you’d like to play a part in shaping our country’s future through changing how we go about creating technology, hit me up at joseph_goh@tech.gov.sg.
Footnotes & Credits & Other Licensing Proverbs
Images
Cover. Thanks to Shermin Ng. Extracted from https://unsplash.com/photos/1PH2uwpYt1w
Fig 1. Thanks to Gemalto. Extracted from https://www.gemalto.com/iot/inspired/smart-cities
Fig 2. Thanks to InSing. Extracted from https://www.insing.com/feature/a-look-back-at-jack-neo-movies/id-cd453101/
