Singapore aims to be a “smart nation,” a city-state that adapts and uses technology to reap the benefits of digitization. One of the ways it has worked toward this goal is by establishing Open Government Products, an experimental tech unit of the government that works to accelerate the nation’s digital transformation. Eric spoke with Sara Espaldon, head of marketing and operations at Open Government Products, about the unit’s efforts to digitize Singapore's government services.

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Eric Egan: Hi everyone. Welcome to Citizen Digital, a new ITIF web series where I speak with experts in the United States and around the world to explore how digital technology can improve citizen experience. My name is Eric Egan, and I’m the policy fellow for digital government at ITIF. And with me today is Sarah Espaldon, head of marketing and operations at Open Government Products in Singapore. Sarah, thanks for joining me today.

Sarah Espaldon: Thanks so much, Eric, for having me. Happy to chat with you.

Eric Egan: So before we jump into the broader conversation, I was hoping you could share a little bit about yourself and your background and how you found yourself working in this space.

Sarah Espaldon: Yeah sure. So, my name is Sarah, and I’ve been working at my team, Open Government Products, which is this experimental tech unit in the Singapore government, for the past 3.5 years. Before that, I was working in brand management here in Singapore as well. And before that I was actually working in New York in news and entertainment. So kind of an interesting career journey.

Eric Egan: Yeah. That is really interesting. And it informs this next question I have for you, which is kind of a standard question around this web series, which focuses on what we’re calling “citizen experience,” focusing on digital technologies. So I’m curious, maybe even given your background, now that you work in the government sector, how would you define citizen experience broadly? And how do you think digital technologies—the role that digital technologies can play in that experience, particularly in the context of Singapore now and in your experience in prior industries as well?

Sarah Espaldon: I think citizen experience can encompass a wide variety of things. And I think there’s lots of different words for it. I think from a public sector point of view it’s really thinking about what are citizens’ interactions with government like. What are their user journeys when they’re dealing with public services? And coming from a brand management background and coming from marketing, it’s really important to think about consumers and user journeys. This is something that’s really interesting to me. Because I think traditionally in the public sector, we often have this tendency to look at things from a very high-level, theoretical policy point of view. But actually, the lived experience of citizens and what they’re encountering day-to-day can vary greatly from what is intended. And I think tech plays a large role in that. In today’s age, tech is everywhere. And so, the presence of technology, the lack of technology, or even the quality of technology in these public services can hugely impact the citizen experience. So, for example, you take something like taxes or forms. Is there technology to make that process easier? Is there not? Do you have to do things manually? Or is it technology? Maybe it’s there, but it’s so frustrating to use. You know how to pay your taxes. It’s just the system’s really buggy or maybe you lose your data and your data. There’s a kind of data breach that leads to lack of trust. So all of these things can contribute to citizen experience.

Eric Egan: Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I do want to return to the forums, because I know OGP kind of had participated in a large effort to digitize forums in Singapore. But before we get to that, it may make sense to share a little bit about OGP, kind of the initial kind of how and the why, how things maybe have changed since you initial vision, initial intent, and maybe how you’ve been able to stick with that vision and maybe other ways in which it’s evolved given your kind of deep relationship with the state of Singapore.

Sarah Espaldon: Yeah, sure. So yeah, I worked for this team called Open Government Products or OGP for short. And we were formed as an experimental tech unit in 2019. But actually the genesis for OGP started even before that. So in 2014, Singapore started this smart nation initiative, which is trying to really figure out how can we have a fully digitized country, whether that’s the economy, government, society. And I think when we were looking at the government perspective, how do we create a truly digital government, we realized there were certain issues that we needed to address. That issue is honestly that government’s around the world grapple with. One of them is security. So I think of course security is key to any digital service, but it’s especially key for government services because you’re asking citizens to trust you with their most precious data. And so any data loss or data breach can be devastating.

And a loss of trust in these digital government services is similar to a loss of trust in the government. But we see lots of different security issues, security breaches usually from unforced, human error or outdated security practices. I think another part of another issue that we needed to address in order to become a digital government is reliability. So when you look at the reliability of government services versus maybe the services in the private sector, you realize that in the private sector, your Instagram, your Facebook, maybe they go down from time to time. They don’t go down to the extent that public services do. And that’s a problem when you’re asking citizens who complete these very important tasks that the services need to be there when they meet them. And then I think lastly, usability. So in terms of usability, security, reliability, these are hygiene factors.

But when those are settled, usability is really key to make sure that citizens have this positive experience that they know how to do the task they need to do on your digital platform. So yeah, I think there were a bunch of different issues that we saw that were preventing us from becoming a truly digital government. And then when we were thinking, okay, why can’t we just solve them? We realized that there are a few things that were in our way. So whether it’s legacy systems, we’re not building from scratch, there’s a bunch of legacy systems that are outdated and not compatible with latest call technology or whether that’s bureaucratic hurdles, lots of different regulations or tech talent either isn’t present or it’s brought in too late to the decision making process. There are so many issues that were present. And meanwhile, you’re looking at the private sector and you’re seeing the private sector’s making so much progress.

They’re using artificial intelligence, they’re using, even Snapchat is using computer vision and they’re making so much progress through technology. And we realize that one of the main reasons they’re able to make this progress is that they’re not just thinking, how do we implement the latest tech? But they’re also thinking about how can we really re-look the whole organization and really look from first principles and really redesign an organization. So whether that’s values, whether that’s organizational design, whether that’s remote working, they’re really looking at all these different fronts. So we were inspired by what was happening in the private sector, and we thought, okay, what if we were to take a modern tech company with these modern tech practices, but working on public sector problems? And that’s the basis for the team that I work on, open government products. So our mission is really to kind of build these good tech products to solve these public sector problems, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s scams, and demonstrate that these private sector tech practices can work effectively and cost efficiently in the government.

And then the last part is really to propagate this to the rest of the public sector because we’re trying to make the whole Singapore government be more efficient and effective. And a big part of that is making sure that across the government we have these modern tech practices. And yeah, you were asking how has it evolved since then? I think we’re still working towards this, and I think we’ve made a lot of progress on this front, but it’s definitely a very different kind of organization than when we first started. So I think when I first started, we were about 20 something people, and now we’re about 120. So lots of growth over the past few years. And then I think the way people treat us is also a little bit different. So I think when we first started out, we were begging people to work with us, like “Please use our products.”

But now we have to prioritize because we have so many products and so many potential partners, which I think is a really great sign of what we’ve been able to achieve. So we talk about building good tech products. I think we’ve proven that you can build good tech products in the government from healthcare. So we built the Singapore’s COVID-19 vaccination system and led to a 96 percent vaccination rate to scams. We built this app to filter and block scam calls and messages, to digital forms, which you mentioned. And I think we’ve been able to show that these practices can be built effectively and can be cost efficient. I think one great example of this is this digital medical certificate that we developed. So a medical certificate, you go to the doctor, you get this medical certificate that you can show to your employer to prove that you were actually at the doctor and not just having brunch or something.

So we built a digital version of this, and originally when it was on traditional government infrastructure, it costs $21,000 a month. And then we moved it to AWS, which is Amazon Web Services, a commercial cloud platform. And we were able to reduce that to $594 a month. So 35 times cost reduction. And this is something that you see across all of our products, which is we’re making things much, much more cost efficiently, they’re more reliable. And I think it’s these results speak for themselves. And so I think now that we are approaching our fourth year of existence, I think we’re starting to focus a lot more on how can we propagate this more broadly to the rest of government? Basically, the idea is to create, it’s a franchise model. So instead of how McDonald has franchises, it’s basically create little OGP in different parts of government. So it’s not that we become this one large mega organization, but we branch out into little pieces so that at the end of the day, you don’t really need OGP anymore because there’s that essence of OGP in all different parts of government.

Eric Egan: Yeah, no, that was a wonderful overview and I’m glad I may ask you to double click on a few more of your products. But something I wanted to follow up on earlier on what you were saying around the kind of balance between usability and security, I think is particularly challenging in the public sector. So yeah, I think I was reading something recently where I think it was maybe someone from Google who had left Amazon and went to Google was talking about how if you’re thinking about product management or if you have usability at zero, you don’t have a product.

But if you have usability at 100, and security at zero, you still have a product. But of course there are other concerns here, but I laugh because you’re obviously that would be huge risk involvement than that, but there’s something to be said around a huge amount of focus on security in the public sector and maybe how that makes innovation and use of digital technology a little more cautious and risk averse in the public sector, certainly that it feels that way in the United States. And I was wondering if you could speak to that balance, and especially in terms of your own product development, how do you reach that balance between usability and security, reliability, accessibility, all those things that you were kind of talking about?

Sarah Espaldon: Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question. Obviously we would want 100 percent of everything. But yeah, I think when you’re an organization that’s trying to move fast, that’s trying to really demonstrate value, I think the biggest thing that you realize is that you can’t have everything. And that’s one thing that we really try to emphasize is that you need to focus on what’s important and make sure you really keep that as your north star. But in terms of security, I think there’s a few things. So I think sometimes we have a tendency to over classify in terms of security.

So there’s a tendency to want to classify everything as restricted or sensitive, but actually maybe that data is actually maybe doesn’t need that kind of data for classification. You talk about, for example, one of our projects is called Parking.sg, which is a parking app that can help you pay for parking. And you know, could argue that actually yeah, these parking sessions, this is very, very sensitive data, but actually is it? Do foreign actors care about how long you were parked for? This data is really doesn’t need to be so classified. And therefore it gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of what you can do with it. For example, storing it in the cloud.

And yeah, I think there’s one of the big ways that we can move faster is to just really take a hard look and to be a little bit more pragmatic about really how should we be classifying the data and how should we be looking at security. But I will say that I think security, I mentioned earlier, I think security is super important again, it’s really tied to this idea of citizens and do citizens trust your digital services? And if they lose that trust, then it’s very problematic for governments. So one thing that we make sure that all of our products do is go through security testing. So I think there’s this approach where you can either, maybe you have this whole list of requirements. I think it’s a more traditional approach where, okay, make sure you tick off all these boxes to make sure that your products are secure.

But actually what our team has tried to do is instead of focusing on this fixed list of security requirements, let’s pen test our products. So basically we take our products before they go out to the public, we send them to these firms, these cryptographic firms with strong cybersecurity expertise, and we say, “Hey, try to hack at our products, try to find whatever vulnerability you can and then let us know.” So that’s what we do for every product. And these firms come back and say, “Okay, here’s a vulnerability.” And then we figure out how to address it. And I think that allows us to move much faster than trying to check off these checklists that very quickly can be outdated.

Eric Egan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s a good point. I think if you’re kind of creating constraints for yourself when you’re sticking to, especially within security, you’re like, “All right, here’s the checklist. And we’re only sticking it to that.” As opposed to “How we inventively try to break our own product.” That’s the idea. That’s one of the reasons.the things like hackathons and those things are all increasingly becoming popular as well in the federal government here in the states as well. So it’s interesting to kind of hear that from the Singapore perspective.

One thing I also wanted to ask, I guess I’ll pivot a little bit. You had mentioned the growth of OGP and this kind of franchise model, which is interesting to me because I know when it comes to especially product development, and there’s a tendency in government feeling to get, maybe it’s less of an issue in Singapore, certainly it’s an issue in the US, but for things that get too big and unwieldy too fast, and best practices in software development these days is keep teams small and interdisciplinary, so you can develop the kind of products that one that users need, but also that particular agency may need.

Has that been a challenge? You mentioned the franchise approach, is that part of that consideration of one, keeping teams on the smaller side so that they’re more independent, they’re not kind of bogged down, the process can still be relatively quick, relatively agile?

Sarah Espaldon: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, for us, I think we try to operate on having these lean competent product teams. So teams of about three to maybe max 10. And it’s exactly what you said, because I think when teams get too big, then they can’t move as fast, and there’s a lot of communication issues that arise and that you have to deal with in order to operate more effectively.

And for us, we really try to empower our teams to make decisions. So it’s not this kind of top down and this is what the boss says, just follow. It’s really these teams are the ones who are working day in and day out on these products. They know what’s best and in order for them to operate effectively, I think it’s keeping them small. So yeah, that’s what we’ve been trying to do with all of our products. And I think a big part of why we don’t want OGP to become this massive 1,000 person organization, we want to keep it small and also make sure that people are really close to the ground. I think that’s very important to us. And you mentioned earlier talking about citizen experiences, making sure they’re close to where the problems are and not adding too much, much bureaucracy, too much bloat because it just slows us down.

Eric Egan: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I guess within these teams too, so you mentioned how from a security point of view, you may use other experts to break the product test security. Do you do anything similar from a user acceptance testing or usability? How do you get user feedback? How do you explore that this particular product or this software may be a positive kind of citizen experience? Kind of bring it back to that.

Sarah Espaldon: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great question. So I think there’s kind of two aspects to it. So I guess from a product perspective are we have great designers, we have product designers on each of our teams. And the product designers do a lot of user testing. So they’re really focused on user-centric design. They’ll test our products at different stages. And the way we approach product development is very iterative. So it’s not, okay, we build a product, pat ourselves on a back, and you’re done. It’s really okay. You try it, you it out, you test it, you try it out again and test it. I think one great example of that is we built this product called Redeem.sg, which is a digital voucher system for the government. So we use it to distribute, I think it’s now 800 million Singapore dollars in COVID relief funds. And for the first iteration or for the first launch of that, we went through, I think it was eight user trials with over 7,000 residents.

So they tried different things, they try a QR code, they try input pin numbers, trying to figure out different ways because these products that we’re building not just for a small segment of the population, they’re really for everybody, including people who are less digitally savvy, including the elderly. So you really need to do a lot of user testing to make sure that these products are usable and are meeting users’ needs. So I think that’s how we approach things from a kind of product perspective. But actually from an organizational perspective, I think we’re also trying to think about how can we make sure that we are building the products and focusing on the things that matter to citizens. And one thing that we do every year is this annual hackathon. It’s called our annual Hack for Public Good. And part of that is really going into the community doing learning journeys with citizens, with other public officers, collecting problem statements, and really trying to find out what the most important problems are.

So we take the whole month of January, we pause our normal work to do this, and we build solutions for these problems. So I think two years ago, one of the Hack for Public Good events, we realized that scams were emerging as a big issue for Singaporeans. Singapore is a huge target for scammers, and we realized that through some of our learning journeys. And so from there we developed Scam Shield, which is this app that you can download on your phone and block scam calls and messages because we realized that while yes, some of the other projects that we’re working on are important, scams is a huge issue, and we need to build a solution to address that.

Eric Egan: Yeah, that’s really cool. Did anything that you just mentioned, that you set aside the month of January for this kind of hackathon event, did anything interesting off the top of your head from this last January since we just wrapped up?

Sarah Espaldon: Yeah, so actually it’s a little delayed this year because we had Chinese New Year in January, which is a big celebration in Singapore. We’re actually having our demo day tomorrow. But yeah, there’s a few exciting projects. One of them is ChatGPT is a big deal now. So I think some of our officers were excited by that and we’re thinking about how we can apply that to the public service to make it easier for public officers to be more efficient in their work. There was a group that was working with the National Heritage Board, so one of the problem statements that they came with was that we have these heritage trails in Singapore and we’re trying to get people to be more excited and to actually take these trails and walk these trails. And so they built this telegram bot to get people to have a more kind of immersive experience and interactive experience and share more stories from people who actually lived in some of these areas.

And then there’s one of my other favorites it is with the Singapore firefighters. So they realized that firefighters have to go through this really manual process of checking all of their equipment every single day for safety to make sure that everything is okay. And they were doing this with paper, they were literally passing one piece of paper around. And so that obviously is prone to error and is not great in a fire station environment. So one of our teams built a product, built an app to make this easier so that people could be testing the equipment concurrently. And hopefully that’ll be a big help for the firemen here in Singapore.

Eric Egan: Very cool. Yeah, the paper and fire, I think traditionally don’t mix well.

Sarah Espaldon: Yeah, not a good combination. Yeah.

Eric Egan: Well, as I expected, we are already quickly running out of time, but one question I wanted to make sure I asked, kind of broad, maybe it’s one you’d have to maybe think about, but in thinking about citizen experience, digital government, that kind of thing, is there anything that really excites you, not even necessarily something you’re working on at OGP or just maybe something you’ve seen in other places around other countries around the world, or just something you think that could be really impactful from kind of a citizen experience point view?

Sarah Espaldon: Yeah, yeah, I think there’s a lot of things. There’s so many possibilities with tech. I think one of the things that’s really exciting to me is this idea of digital identity. So for example, in Singapore we have this thing called Singpass, which is your official digital identity. And our team is actually creating a protocol on that called SGID. And the cool thing about SGID is it puts citizens in control of your data. So for example, last year we developed this product called Sync with SGID and Sync basically took COVID data and let citizens control who they shared that data with. So whether that’s your COVID-19 vaccination status, whether that’s your test results, you can select for example, if you want to share that with an employer, you can say that, “Okay, I don’t want to share this information with my employer again.”

But I think this is really very, the basic application of this, I think there are so many more applications that you can do with this kind of digital identity. So for example, you look at Facebook, Twitter, we are having discussions with some of these companies and they were saying one of the big issues is making sure that people are who they say they are, that they’re above a certain age because I remember when I was younger, I would change my birthdate so that I could use Facebook, but now with something like SGID and this kind of digital identity, you can basically have citizens say that, “Okay, I want Facebook or Twitter to know that I’m over 18. That’s the only information that I share with them.” So Facebook can verify that these people are 18, they’re adults, but they don’t know anything else about you.

And you can see that as for governments, I think it’s a big possibility, big opportunity. For example, one thing that the Singapore government is always trying to do is really understand more what citizens’ viewpoints are. So you could conceivably create an online citizen forum and you can ensure that people are Singaporean, right? It’s tied to this digital identity, but the citizens can control that, “Okay, I’m only sharing that I’m Singaporean, the government won’t know, no one else will know anything else about me. They won’t want to know my name, my age, or whatever. They just know that I’m a citizen of Singapore.” And therefore, with this kind of anonymity it’s anonymity but it also makes sure that there’s not foreign actors, for example, contributing to these citizen forums. So I think it’s really exciting because it really puts citizens again at the center and puts citizens in control of their own data. So I think that’s one really exciting thing I see. Which is really the marriage of tech with citizen experience and empowering citizens.

Eric Egan: Yeah, yeah, I agree digital ID really has the opportunity to be transformative for digital government. And if you look at other, the better versions of digital government like in Estonia and others where t’s something they’ve done for a while now and it’s one of the reasons they’re able to do so many things as a digital government is because it’s structured around something like a digital ID and kind of a national ID and a digitized version of that. So yeah, I believe that’s all the time we have. Sarah, thanks again for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Sarah Espaldon: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I enjoyed chatting.

Eric Egan: And for those watching, please stay tuned for more episodes of Citizen Digital.