Meet the man leading changes to government e-services portals

SINGAPORE — From SingPass to “Ask Jamie”, MyInfo to OneInbox, Mr Kwok Quek Sin has his hands full juggling 18 government digital products as a director in the Government Technology Agency (GovTech), driving Singapore’s Smart Nation move.

Flash back seven years ago: Mr Kwok, already an IT professional with more than 15 years of experience then, was a reluctant joinee to the then-Infocomm Development Authority. He was persuaded by his former boss at Hewlett Packard who made the move himself, but Mr Kwok wondered if his “non-compliant” self would be suitable for the “restricted, bureaucratic (and) uncreative” environment that he initially associated with the public sector.

Today, the 45-year-old no longer holds that view and encourages private-sector candidates to do the same. He is now director of the digital services product management division parked under the newly formed GovTech, which has some 1,800 employees including data scientists, technologists and engineers working to drive digital transformation in public services. He is also one of the more-than-780 public servants earmarked to be the nation’s emerging cohort of leaders under the Public Service Leadership Programme.

Talking about his job, Mr Kwok finds it exciting and liberating that he gets to solve the inconveniences that citizens face, by putting himself in their shoes as a consumer.

“If you go through a home-loan application process, you would tear out your hair,” he told TODAY, referring to how applicants need to present statements from the Inland Revenue Authority, Central Provident Fund, Housing and Development Board and Urban Redevelopment Authority, among others.

“You will need 12 sets of supporting documents (but) eight sets of these can be provided by (the Government).”

That was how MyInfo was created. It is a new e-service that allows online application forms across government agencies to be automatically filled with the citizen’s data.

“(Government agencies) should talk (to each other so that) users don’t need to keep submitting the same documents... many times,” he said.

Mr Kwok is looking to adapt MyInfo to get around another nagging observation he has: How the Government would be “shy” and “uneasy” about working too closely with the private sector.

“As a consumer myself, (I thought) it would be helpful for me if this information can also be shared with the banks,” he explained. His team is thus working on an offshoot of MyInfo called MyInfo e-Know-Your-Customer, where citizens can give consent to the release of personal data to financial institutions for use, in cases where they need to open a bank account or apply for a loan, for example.

At a developed stage, there may even be a system that can become more anticipatory, Mr Kwok envisioned — much like how Facebook draws on a user’s Google searches to provide targeted advertising.

So based on records with the Ministry of Health, for instance, users may get an online prompt about a grant from the Agency for Integrated Care for which they qualify, instead of needing to fish for relevant information across government websites.

In his former job, where he was hired as a supplier under HP to develop and maintain the Manpower Ministry’s system for work permits and employment passes, there was “limited” ownership to revamp it. Now, Mr Kwok sees himself playing the role of an internal consultant to the whole Government.

He is not looking for “sky high” transformations every time, and calls innovation “an overused word”. “Innovation can be very small. It can be day-to-day stuff. Instead of doing things manually, you write a script to automate it. That’s innovation,” he said.

A notable homegrown innovation on his radar is the Bus Uncle Facebook Messenger chat bot, that is already a hit since its launch two weeks ago. “(The) responses are quite funny… We continue to learn... (One is) how it tries to talk to you in a relaxed way,” he said, hinting at how he might tweak his approach to Ask Jamie, a virtual assistant recently introduced on government websites to answer questions users have about e-services. 

“Can the Government be so informal? Maybe. Maybe we can start to relax a little bit,” Mr Kwok said.