At the Public Sector CIO Convex 2016, organised by the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU), Tan Sri Dr. Ali Bin Hamsa, Chief Secretary to the Government of Malaysia outlined five key areas of thrust, as part of the Public Sector ICT Strategic Plan (PSISP).
The PSISP will serve as the blueprint for the implementation of a citizen-centric digital government and enhancing the efficiency and productivity of the public service hover the next five years. Accordingly, the theme of the conference for this year was ‘Digital government towards digital citizens’.
The five strategic thrusts are:
- Customer-centric – Digital services will be integrated, so that data can be presented through a single window, allowing customers to shape, share and consume information, whenever and however, they want it.
- Multichannel – Government agencies will interact with citizens through many different channels, including websites, email, smartphone applications and social media.
- Information-centric – Agencies will change their approach in how they manage information. They will move to managing discrete pieces of open data from managing documents, so that the information can be presented in a way which will be most useful for consumers.
- Shared platform – Resources and costs would be rationalised across government departments and agencies, by centralising, consolidating and standardising common applications and infrastructure, such as data centres, networks and security surveillance.
- Security and privacy – There will be strong focus on security and privacy, to foster public trust in services used, transacted and communicated. (A Public Sector Cyber Security Framework and a National Cryptography policy are available to public sector agencies.)
Tan Sri Dr. Ali Bin Hamsa said that bringing together transparency of information and big data analytics can help track service delivery and facilitate improvements in efficiency. At the moment, 1463 data sets are available in the Public Sector Open Data Portal, data.gov.my. The target is to increase it to 7000 datasets by 2020. Improving this platform is key to unlocking its value through community usage and creation of applications.
In furtherance of the open data initiative, the Malaysian public service is collaborating with the Open Data Institute and the World Bank. An Open Data Readiness Assessment was conducted by the Malaysian government together with the World Bank earlier in November.
