Think about where we are going to be and what we are going to do in the next 5 years. MAMPU is entrusted to chart the roadmap as to what the citizens need from the public sector. Use that as a guidance for your planning over the next 5 years.
There is a lot of jargon being thrown at us like big data, IoT, analytics, and so on. The more things change, the more that other things stay the same. We embrace a lot of this sophisticated technology but we cannot forget why we are here. IT does not exist for IT sakes; it exists to support the business.
So, what is the business of Government? To support the citizens, to address the citizens well-being, to ensure security, and to make sure that they can contribute to the economy.
There is a fusion between business and technology. Between digitisation and digitalisation, as those are being thrown at us, we consider Digital Government and what it means. To me, it means a fusion between IT and business.
Apart from tools, business processes are also changing as a result of new technology such as mobile, cloud computing and wearables.
The tools that IT enables must serve the business and the business must look at the tools, how they streamline the business and serve the demands of society. Government is entrusted to provide some of the key government services to the citizens. For some of these services, they can only be provided by Government.
There should be a mind-set change within Government, so that it can be ‘supply driven’. What does the citizen want? We have to get in their mind and find that out. It is hard to keep up and we are chasing this, trying to keep up with the demands of the citizens.
On our side, we must look at our services and determining if we must keep working in silos or should we come together and collaborate.
People need to be given sustainable services and we cannot give them something for the sake of doing it, for it to last only one or two years and investment go down the drain. That does not serve the business.
Apart from that, we know that there are thousands of government online services. Ninety percent of our government services are online, that is a big number!
I tested this with some people I engage with and asked them, do you know that we have so many government services online? Most of the time, they are only familiar with e-Filing.
We need to offer end-to-end government online services. It is not such a simple thing for agencies to link services together. We can’t see ourselves as clusters so we can meet the demands from citizens.
Payment gateways has been adopted by many of our government services. All of us are doing online banking.
MDEC discovered that 76 percent of our online service users are quite satisfied. But, we are not satisfied with this number, and we must continue to improve. Our citizens must be satisfied with our services but first, government must provide services that exceed citizen expectations.
We must make sure that security is in place and that we need to be trusted by the citizens. At the strategic and technical level, we must be guided by security and this should be an utmost priority.
With respect to communications, how can we take advantage of things like social media for our core business? Some of our analysts are catching up on that, but others are doing business as usual.
MCMC told us that in Malaysia, the average citizen is holding 2 mobile phones. So, how can we leverage on that? How can we reach them? We can reach citizens in a different manner through these channels.
In MAMPU, we see cloud services as an important area for us to focus on. We have some data centres that have been around for a while now. We need to up our game and create IT-as-a-Service. We want to create a synced up government cloud, then we can churn out applications on the fly. Right now, I think stakeholders want to wait 6 months for our systems to development. We are in negotiation to enable an environment which would cut this time.
Now, we will focus on the IT Strategic Plan for 2016 to 2021. The full document will be made available in April for you to understand in full detail.
As we see here, when everything changes, other things will stay the same. Nothing works if you do not know what to do. If we hand our people some really sophisticated technology, if our people are not there to pick it up and make use of it. We would not be able to deliver it.
We have to take in professionals (i.e. data scientists and enterprise architects) so that we can develop and present the way that we will use technologies. Then, stakeholders will understand that it something that needs to be done.
IT is not IT for the sake of it, it needs to make people understand the business requirement. This is how we translate this to the stakeholders. With the framework, we make it specifically aligned to what we believe we must work towards.
We need to collaborate. MAMPU cannot do it alone and we must come together with other agencies. Only when we come together with other agencies, will we realise the needs of the citizens.
For example, you want to deliver an application for certain business transactions. There is a lot of business terms to account for, business processes, and in order to do that, the whole cluster must get together.
That is why we get together with agencies such as MCMC, MDeC, MIMOS, IPT, Cyber Security Malaysia. We are not just saying this, we are doing it! We have working projects with many of them because we realise we cannot do this alone.
The Data Sea is another project we are working on, related to collaboration. When we want to shift the idea of what we want to do, we do scanning and research. But, we want the insight from the Data Sea because if we are to invest money, we want to see what is coming and what the predictive analytics say.
The Malaysia MYGovernment Online Services Portal has been up for a few years and used to be an information database but that is not the way it should be now. Now, we are leveraging on collaboration and engagement with the industry. You will be seeing some changes in the system this year.
A lot of people have been talking about Open Data. Thank you to all of the organisations that have been publishing your data sets. We have received an exponential increase of data sets over the course of the last few months, to more than 1,000.
We are going to shatter the name that the public sector is stingy and does not want to share their data sets. We do want to share our data but maybe some agencies do not know how to share their data on our platform. Go to data.gov.my, we will be doing an upgrade on this site soon.
We expect you to try this out and let us know how we can improve this platform. That is a platform for all of us. Industry, citizens, and government alike, we want to create a cooperative and open participation environment. Data.gov.my will not be successful unless there is a lot of business value generated by the community or mobile apps generated using this data.
Government Data Optimization and Transformation Services (GDOTS) are data driven exercises. We want the data to work for us, helping us in planning and decision making.
National Registries and the Centralised Data Exchange (CDX) are enabled through the idea that the bottom line government service delivery system will be citizen-centric. That is our mantra right now!
This is the jist of the ICT Strategic Plan for the next five years. If there is something that we may have overlooked, please come to us with your feedback, as there is still room for tweaking and things are always changing.
Thank you to OpenGov for giving us this platform to share the ICT Strategic Plan.