The Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) is signing an Memorandum of Intent (MOI) with the National University of Singapore (NUS) for development of manpower and capability in public sector agencies in areas of technological innovation.
GovTech and NUS will pool their resources and expertise, sharing experience and insight on technological innovation gained from their respective projects, for the benefit of public officers and students at the university.
NUS will provide technology expertise and access to professional services required for such training sessions imparted data science training to at least 2,000 public officers annually, improving public officers’ knowledge and understanding of data science to address challenges faced by the public sector.
Ms Jacqueline Poh, Chief Executive, GovTech, said, “Increased adoption of data science in the public sector will transform the way that the Government delivers services to the public. We are glad to partner NUS, which will help us put this tool into the hands of 10,000 public officers over the next five years, and educate them to use it effectively. This will help us improve and quicken our efforts in building Singapore into a Smart Nation. We look forward to working with more parties to make this happen.”
For the training of students, various collaboration modes will be explored, including internships, final year projects, challenges and hackathons, to develop the right skill sets in NUS students, enabling them to succeed in the future workforce.
Personnel will be exchanged and attached to each other’s organisation under a new GovTech-NUS Exchange Programme. GovTech and NUS will also identify a data science project to collaborate on.
The partnership will also include co-creation of solutions to challenges faced by the public sector, with a focus on the areas of cyber security, artificial intelligence, and data science. The two will work together to develop methods and processes to strengthen cyber security for public agencies.
These initiatives are in line with the recommendations from the Committee on the Future Economy (CFE) report for public officers to acquire skills and innovative thinking methods in order to achieve a well-coordinated, technology-enabled and future-ready public service.
The press release stated that GovTech will continue to form similar strategic partnerships in the future. In another recent example from last month, GovTech signed six individual Memorandums of Understanding (MOU), and two MOIs with eight Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) to provide training opportunities for over 300 students from the IHLs.
Featured image: NUS School of Computing (Jiangxiang/ licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License)
