How Singapore will run the country using APIs

Taxi availability data. The government is putting data like these into the hands of citizens.

Say you have an animal problem in your neighborhood in Singapore. Who do you report this to?

It depends on whether the animal’s dead or alive, domestic or wild. And if it’s a bird, is it a crow? The combination of your answers determines who you’d talk to.

The bureaucratic maze is so complex that people give up and “phone a friend” instead. Only it’s the police.

To fix this, the Singapore government created an app called OneService, which is essentially a one-stop destination to report any municipal issue, covering areas like pest control, cleanliness, trees, and construction sites.

The report will then to be sent to the relevant agency for action, with progress updates given in-app.

Sounds simple enough. So why didn’t the government do this earlier?

Chan Cheow Hoe, the government chief information officer at the Infocomm Development Agency of Singapore (IDA), has been trying to crack this problem since he came on board two years ago.

And as he’ll tell you, the government is a complex organ unlike anything he’s encountered in his years working on banking and commercial IT systems.

“Take licensing systems for example. Why can’t we have one mother of all licensing systems that does licensing for the whole government? Of course you can, but you know how complex it is to build that?

“And it’s not just five agencies. It’s more like 85 agencies. Trying to put all the rules together is the kiss of death,” says Chan.

So the government tried another way to integrate, using a sort of distributed architecture. Instead of creating a Frankenstein’s monster that attempts to fulfil a thousand requirements from dozens of agencies, why not just bind these disparate systems together to a separate “engagement layer,” which is what the user interacts with?

The new Data.gov.sg

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