Brian Sweeting

In my class “Strategic Use of Information Systems” we read and analyzed a case study about the Singaporean Government’s implementation of their National Information Infrastructure. Singapore’s NII was defined as a “common electronic platform for efficient delivery of information and services” and consisted of three core components–conduit, content, and compute. Each component under the purview of several government agencies and involved many players in the public and private sectors. Conceived in 1992, the NII has been the foundation for Singapore to attain the status of a “developed nation” by 1996. Originally it was thought that this economic status would not be attained until 2020.

Some keys that lead to the success of the project were:

• The government’s point of view that information infrastructure planning was likely to become the social planning of the 21st century, just as transportation and land use planning had been of the 60’s and 70’s.
• The government was organized in a relatively flat structure that minimized bureaucracy and maximized efficiency and expediency.
• Singapore’s civil service was known for its commitment to economic development, efficiency, and a strict code of ethics.
• The government was able to promote unity among it’s culturally diverse population.
• Funding for infrastructure projects came mostly through government channels and once a decision had been made to proceed with a particular project, funds were provided until completion.
• To fund infrastructure projects, the government relied mostly on internal sources of capital and regularly accumulated a budget surplus.
• After providing upfront capital investments for infrastructure projects, the government set up agencies and so-called statutory boards to operate them and recover operating costs. Statutory boards were created by enabling legislation which usually tied them to a Ministry but were not government departments.
• These organizations generally operated without government subsidies and could retain their earnings to expand their programs, and most of them were actually expected to make money, and the government used a “tax” to retrieve excess funds from boards that operated with a substantial surplus.
• Commitment to infrastructure development did not mean that budgetary approval was simple. Productivity gains had to be demonstrated, often in terms of labor savings or more recently in terms of improvement in quality of life.
• Services like Singapore’s telecom organization were reorganized to operate more like a private company than a government organization.

This case made me think about how this relates to our federal, state, and local government. It seems, from the weblogs I read, that integrating the systems of different agencies is such a key issue. How much easier would this integration be if it had been built on a national (or at least statewide) infrastructure like Singapore’s. This includes information infrastructure built on a framework of policies and technical standards. And the technical infrastructure built on common framework of network services.

This was a very interesting case, and has many more facets than I can list here. I tried finding the full-text of this case online, but was unable to. It can be purchased through Harvard Business School Publishing.