Week 8 - IT Pro or IT cost Centre ?

IT in Singapore

In 50 years since independence, Singapore has grown rapidly to become a finance and trading hub. Part of her success is attributed to the authoritarian yet business friendly approach to politics and governance. 

Like many East asian countries, education has been a primary focus in shifting the economy from a cheap manufacturing hub to that of a high skilled knowledge economy.

Established 2 years after independence,  the Singapore Computer Society (SCS) has always been committed to shaping the technology sector in Singapore. Like many developed economies, outside of Universities, the SCS connects like minded individuals in promoting professionalism and certifications.

However, due to addiction to foreign labour and Multinational Companies, small medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are rarely incentivized to train and nurture their talent. As such, before the second Silicon Valley tech boom after 2009, most SMEs view IT professionals as a cost centre rather than a valuable human resource. Anecdotally, most IT professionals do not see themselves and being valued and they tend to move to management rather than engineering. 

In the blog referenced below, "The two tiers of Singapore's Tech companies" a malaysian programmer highlights the issue medium and lower tier companies are still stuck in the old mindset where IT talent can always be outsourced and this leads to a jarring and huge divide between the "top tier" FAANG companies and local SMEs. The neglect in engineering culture has therefore exacerbated the lack of IT talent in the world where building "Scaling platforms" is paramount.

While recurring problems from the political system remains, the Singapore government has enough political capital and money to build a strong IT team in the civil service. Since 2016, a bill was launched to restructure existing Ministry of Communication to establish GovTech. A technology arm which imports the engineering culture from Silicon Valley. 

Of which has produced an online digital identity system modeled after Estonia, streamlined paperwork in the civil service and built a contact tracing app early into the 2019 Covid Pandemic.

These initiatives although not unique, the centralized nature of Singapore political culture has the ability to produce results in the public sector. 

However as previously mentioned, the core problems of old industries and lack of unicorns still plagues Singapore due to the outdated education system and conservative culture of not taking risk.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References:

https://www.scs.org.sg/about

https://www.scs.org.sg/communities#chaptersHome

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/singapore-deep-technology-talent-scheme-foreign-it-enginneering-858716

https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/bills-passed-establishment-imda-govtech

https://www.tech.gov.sg/products-and-services/singpass/

https://www.tech.gov.sg/products-and-services/formsg/

https://www.ndi-api.gov.sg/safeentry

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 9 - Examples of Ergonomics and HCI, Success and Failure

Image
Thoughtful and context dependent design in mobile interfaces Since the advent of mobile phones, websites have evolved to scale their interfaces to fit a small screen. However, the layout of mobile websites were often designed as an afterthought rather than a native experience.  Often, the website takes too long to load, the buttons are too small, icons discernible and the font of the text unreadable in a small screen. Coming a long way since the era of Palm and Blackberry personal devices, smartphone prevalence heralded an interesting approach called "native" or "mobile first" user interface (UX) design. One such example is that of contextual hidden navigation Depending on the device, modern websites can scale according to the size of the screen to show the most used information. In addition,  the icons app-like bringing familiarity to new visitors and viewers from other platforms. Example of Catastrophic design In 2017, Juicero sold a juicer which required a phone
Read more

Wiki Review - The History and Impact of Youtube

 Review of YouTube Group Wiki The written wiki on YouTube is comprehensive in its breath and depth. From informing the reader of the history and origins of online video streaming, the wiki provided detailed account of notable specific events affecting the trajectory of the now gargantuan platform.  The wiki includes a deep dive of the technical aspects of running a large video streaming service including the business model of advertisement to pay for the infrastructure. What was most interesting is the social impact of YouTube. The positives democratizing and bringing education to the masses but the negative problems of radicalization and astroturfing. What is impressive about this wiki, is that diving deep into the content moderation guidelines allows readers to understand the nuance and complexity of regulating YouTube. For many of us, YouTube is more than just a media consumption medium. The content hosted on YouTube is a place of Cultural discussion, sense of belonging and where pe
Read more

Week 4 - Review on Information Society Report by Pekka Himanen (2004)

Perspectives of an Information Society in 2004 vs Now Pekka Himanen wrote the report in 2004, where the United States was still the Global Hegemon and Cultural power. He envisioned a future where globalization led to a more enlightened world where information access would alleviate the complex pressures of social inequality and global trade. While Pekka had a realistic view of the challenges faced with tax heavens and aging societies he had perhaps underestimated that technology perhaps IT has accelerated the problems rather than alleviate them. The rise of Social media has turned information access into a privatized filter bubble where vested political and business interests have turned the common man against one another. We see this phenomenon in the divide of the "Right vs the Left" and polarized youtube comments. The fundamental issue of this problem is the lack of reforms in the political structure in social democracies which has allowed authoritarian governments to rise
Read more