In May 2018, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) had rolled out the Digital Framework for Action to turn Singapore into a leading digital economy. The key plans centred around collaborations with partners and platform enablers. Since then, digital transformation has emerged as a key approach to help companies through the COVID-19 crisis, and the government had set aside more than S$500 million at the height of the pandemic to facilitate the digital transformation efforts of local businesses.
In relation to digital adoption, Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat quoted a McKinsey study and noted that the pandemic had achieved in weeks what would have taken five years. “Digital solutions will become more deeply embedded in our lives,” he added. Continuing in the trajectory of digital transformation for businesses, the Digital Government Blueprint was updated in December 2020 and builds upon the work from previous eGovernment masterplans.
The areas for continued development included the re-engineering of the government’s ICT infrastructure to provide reliable, resilient and secure systems. This would enable stakeholders to not only raise their digital capabilities but to pursue innovation as well. This requires key stakeholders such as businesses to not only digitalise their business models by leveraging technology (e.g., creating a website and/or an application) but using platforms to create holistic business models by using and creating connections. This network effect is the key that unlocks potentially new opportunities for businesses.
Companies would need to gather and enhance their abilities to monetise value created by platforms. This is dependent on the sources of value that could be exploited and this generally falls into four areas: access to value creation, access to the market, access to tools, and curation. Since data is the currency that drives the digital platform economy, the government has facilitated the utilisation of this platform approach for companies through tools such as MyInfo, which is a government-developed data platform that has enabled locally registered businesses to digitalise their business operations by requesting for citizen’s personal data with their consent via secure Application Programming Interfaces (API). Businesses were then able to retrieve verified personal data for B2C digital transactions.
The aim of this workshop is to examine the problems and potential solutions in terms of policy measures to facilitate digital transformation among companies — in not only encouraging traditional linear companies to use digital technology but also transforming linear business models to platform business models. Some of the likely concerns would be the infrastructure requirement, the impact on the environment, the issue of privacy of data, and training and skilling of manpower to prepare the ecosystem to accommodate this digital economy.