Government services are commonly perceived to be tedious, paperwork-intensive and frustrating.
But Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech) changed the game with its launch of MyInfo in 2016.
Adopting a ‘Tell Us Once’ approach, the service helps residents – with their consent – pre-fill online forms with their government-verified personal data.
“Research shows that an average form has 14.8 fields,” said Kendrick Lee, Director, Trusted Data & Services, GovTech. “This could be a source of frustration for citizens, because they are going to be manually keying in information which the government probably already has. At GovTech, we want to eliminate this unnecessary task.” The goal is to make digital government services as easy as possible for citizens, he added.
From the user’s perspective, everything is streamlined and convenient. But at the backend, there are stringent processes and measures in place to ensure security of the data involved. The data is retrieved, from secured systems of participating agencies to fill up online forms for the transaction, after the user has authenticated his or her identity via SingPass and provided their express consent. In addition, users can choose to be notified via SMS or e-mail alerts whenever a digital service has requested the data.
Citizens can also authorise participating private sector entities to use their MyInfo profile to pre-fill forms. Businesses can only access the data upon users’ consent, and are required by law to comply with the Personal Data Protection Act to protect the personal data in their possession.
From a product to a platform
“Since its launch, MyInfo has received very encouraging responses from the users,” said Kendrick. This prompted GovTech to extend the service to the private sector, which was facing similar challenges. “It was then decided that we would pilot the use of MyInfo beyond the public sector, starting with the banks.”
In May 2017, the one-stop data platform was extended to the banking sector in a pilot with five participating banks. One of them was OCBC, which subsequently launched Singapore's first instant account opening for deposits by leveraging MyInfo. This enabled OCBC’s account opening services to ‘upgrade’ from instant approval to instant use. For example, a personal loan can be released to a new customer’s account instantly.
Besides allowing businesses to develop more seamless digital services and reduce transaction time, banks also benefitted from operational efficiency due to lesser manual paper verification.
“On the back of a successful pilot, the service was then extended to all locally-registered companies,” Kendrick said. Today, there are almost 200 private sector and more than 150 government digital services offering MyInfo. The service now encompasses all SingPass Government to Citizen (G2C) and Government to Business (G2B) digital services.
As the Trusted Data layer of Singapore’s National Digital Identity, MyInfo works with the other components – such as SingPass Mobile – to help citizens authenticate and authorise the sharing of their personal data. A pilot of the corporate version of MyInfo has also been launched. Known as MyInfo Business, it facilitates small and medium enterprise (SME) business owners in their commercial transactions.
Always a work in progress
Speaking on how product management is integral to the development of the platform, Kendrick explained, “MyInfo is essentially a collection of open APIs that users can integrate with different services. We want it to be as simple as possible for our users – not just the citizens, but also the government agencies and businesses utilising the platform.”
This means that it is crucial for the development team to be in tune to the needs of their users. Identifying and validating the problem statement is the first step. “During the development process, design thinking was leveraged in conjunction with agile methodology. We highlighted the pain point we wanted to address – in this case, it is the tedious nature of the government services – and developed the product against the backdrop of this problem.”
An iterative process is then set in place, enabling the team to quickly evaluate the effectiveness of the solution. Along the way, issues were refined and redefined. “Even now, it is an ongoing process as we continue to improve on MyInfo to make sure that it addresses new use cases and is concurrently usable for all relevant stakeholders,” Kendrick said.
But most importantly, the product has to be easy to adopt. “After all, there is no point building a product that nobody wants to use,” he concluded.
Kendrick Lee is an adjunct lecturer with NUS-ISS for Digital Products & Platforms. For more information or to sign up for our suite of courses on Digital Innovation & Design, click here or here for courses on Digital Agility.