Questions/Answers

Singapore has prioritized addressing citizens’ needs via advanced flexible systems. A work methodology is established to curate services around users’ life-events or life milestones to offer them relevant services, keeping their needs and wants in mind. These services are consolidated on a single platform – like LifeSG – to bring about greater convenience to everyone. LifeSG (formerly known as Moments of Life) is a Strategic National Project under Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. The app consolidates government services across multiple agencies and personalises content recommendations based on individual needs to help users discover services and information that are relevant to them, regardless of which government agency they are provided by. By bundling, consolidating and integrating some of these resources and processes, LifeSG aims to help residents who may not be familiar with government services navigate them with greater ease.

With over 100 agencies across the whole of government in Singapore, it is often frustrating for citizens to navigate the landscape of government services and traverse across multiple websites. Based on in-depth user research, users face several problems when interacting with the government. First, users deal with siloed agencies and disconnected processes. Second, services can be difficult to find. Third, in these searches, users may be unaware of services that they can benefit from. Singapore has prioritised solving these problems by building a personalised citizen-facing platform LifeSG. A work methodology called the Service Journey (SJ) is established to design and curate services around life-events in a user-centric manner. LifeSG offers features in intuitive ways such as grouping services by topics or by life-events. This offers citizens one consolidated touchpoint to quickly access the myriad of services. Transacting with government has never been easier. The app is intuitive to use and has helped achieve cost and time savings to users and government agencies.

Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions (16.6, 16.10, 16B.) LifeSG is a mobile app designed to remove the siloes in government service processes by modelling service journeys so that agencies can render their services in an effective way and citizens can enjoy a seamless experience. LifeSG’s goal is to help citizens access relevant information about public service quickly so that they can perform useful transactions according to their needs. LifeSG being a citizen-centric mobile app, promotes non-discriminatory laws and policies that help citizens improve their quality of life. For example, citizens can get help from agencies in key moments of life such as starting family, seeking help during unemployment and planning for retirement.

LifeSG being a SNDGO strategic initiate, aims to leverage on software technology to help citizens access government services without the need to suffer the pains of reaching multiple agencies especially when the problem is complex. By creating a single digital touch-point, the goal is to create the equivalent of a personal digital assistant that can answer the citizen’s queries quickly through a combination of business process modelling and app user experience design. The resultant efficiency makes public service more efficient and sustainable compared to existing workflows that require heavy human and economic support.

In the past, after the birth of a child, parents have to get to different touchpoints to register their child’s birth, apply for baby bonus and national library membership separately via manual forms. The waiting times at hospital or ICA counters to register and collect the child’s birth certificate could take between 30 minutes or over 1 hour during peak hours. Now that LifeSG bundled all the 3 services (birth registration, baby bonus and national library membership application) into one single form on the single platform, this helps reduce the parents’ waiting to less than 10 minutes to collect their child’s birth certificate and application for the respective services.

NA

The LifeSG mobile app currently covers over 100 government e-services and they are categorized according to “key moments of life” so that citizens at different stages and transitions of their lives can find relevant services for their needs. Based on the current content and e-services onboarded in LifeSG, the target groups are mainly the digitally savvy adults spanning the 25-60 years of age group.

Upon identifying the different milestones and government touchpoints of a Young Parent, an interagency project team and governance was set up to augment the delivery of services to families with young children. Citizens’ feedback and needs informed the basis of the service design principles, which were to provide: • Clear, Timely and personalized information • Convenient and seamless access to all Government Information and services • Assurance of the status and benefits one is eligible for • Control and simplicity when accessing government services • Trust, empowerment and confidence for parents in making decisions for the family Having a One Public Service team helped in breaking down silos to better understand agency interdependences and requirements to provide an integrated and seamless experience with above in mind. This led to seamless data sharing across agencies by adopting a holistic view of the citizen, streamlined backend processes and reusable common digital services to be shared across WOG.

The two main challenges learnt in the course of developing a digitized and efficient service journey are: - the time required for the business process modelling - the technology readiness of supporting partner agencies involved The team has built a number of technology components known as “common modules” that can help to accelerate the implementation of service journeys. The approach is to utilize generalizable functions to piece the entire service experience instead of building bespoke components that can take a long time. Moreover, this provides an environment that naturally facilitates digitally ready service partners hence creating a multiplier effect on the speed of development.

LifeSG uses technology to simply complex engagements between citizens and the government. It handles stakeholders from the demand and supply sides of the app by not only re-engineering the service delivery part but the product level app experience for the users as well. This is in contrast different to other superficial aggregation techniques such as creating agency listings that neither address service efficiency nor the pain-points citizens face when they are seeking help.

The team has been connected with the UK government digital services department to share its experience and inspirations on service journey designs at multiple levels, such as policy, technology and implementation. Furthermore, the same methodology has been applied to GovTech’s government-to-business product team where a simple product has been launched to help businesses navigate and access government services efficiently.

The LifeSG app is built on GovTech’s technology stack that leverages on a secure and high-performance cloud infrastructure in the backend while the app utilizes state-of-the-art front-end toolkits such as React, Google’s agile app deployment environment, Firebase and various open-sourced components.

Yes, the same service journey design methodology has been applied to another government-to-business facing product in GovTech. While the context is different, the approach is largely the same – this involves stakeholders coming together to co-create a seamless operations and end-user experience through business process re-modelling and software technology.

Please refer to Section 7a.

The average cost per year for LifeSG since its inception is approximately 15M SGD which includes building and maintenance of its technology platform.

As any citizen-centric government progresses with more services designed to improve lives, there will always be a corresponding increase in complexity for people to understand, navigate and access these services. LifeSG is an epitome of how services can be rendered to users in a seamless way, via business process re-modelling and the usage of technology to achieve the best outcome for citizens in a cost-effective way for the long term.

Yes

LifeSG is evaluated internally by an app audit committee on a regular basis on its usability and technical vulnerabilities to ensure the best experience and safeguards are provided to its users.

The Accessibility Insights for Android is used for scanning accessibility related issues while a simple usability scan was performed based on heuristics by human inspection. The software vulnerability check is performed by an internally developed scanner tool.

In 2020, the main findings point to accessibility and vulnerability issues, and this has been addressed in 2021 by appropriate software level improvements. These gaps highlighted the importance of creating an inclusive product that can serve a wider audience and correspondingly the risks of security flaws that can jeopardizes personal data privacy rights.

The common goal in many agencies is to streamline operations and be ever efficient when it comes to rendering their services to citizens. Moreover, as the world gets increasingly digitalized, technology can be a leverage for agencies to achieve this goal much more easily. Hence this initiative brings even greater gravity that attracts the participation of many agencies so that they can collectively reap the benefits from this collaboration.

The LifeSG product team engages multiple government agencies to create different service journeys for the citizens. To date, we have engaged over fifteen agencies and each service journey work involves different partners who would share their domain expertise for the entire team to conceptualize and deliver the final product. The engagement takes place starting with the problem statement derived from data sources from a lead agency and thereafter a design sprint that may take place over a few months for the conceptualization, modelling and eventually the implementation of the final service journey.

The two main challenges learnt in the course of developing a digitized and efficient service journey are: - the time required for the business process modelling - the technology readiness of supporting partner agencies involved The team has built a number of technology components known as “common modules” that can help to accelerate the implementation of service journeys. The approach is to utilize generalizable functions to piece the entire service experience instead of building bespoke components that can take a long time. Moreover, this provides an environment that naturally facilitates digitally ready service partners hence creating a multiplier effect on the speed of development.