The Malaysian government recently announced the upcoming establishment of GovTech Malaysia, a new digital government arm that will improve the government's ability to adopt a “whole of government” approach to digital government transformation, Business Today reported.
As Malaysia commits more resources towards digitizing government services, the question arises of how to build such services in a resilient and user-friendly manner. These services often leverage citizen data and need to be accessible and sufficiently easy to use to be widely and effectively deployed.
To learn about the considerations government agencies should keep in mind when transitioning from traditional to digital government services, GovInsider spoke with Head of Solutions at Awantec Systems, a provider of information and communication technology services and cloud-based solutions in Malaysia. We speak to Mr. Lee Wai Theng.
What are the key considerations when digitizing government services?
The pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital services in both the government and private sectors. However, the fear of cyber-attacks remains the biggest challenge for citizens in accessing government services, especially when it comes to sharing personal information such as healthcare and personal data.
I'm still pretty shocked to see applications that can expose personal data without user protection services like ReCAPTCHA or SSL. Bots can be easily programmed to capture large amounts of personal information.
A very important consideration is inclusivity. I was happy to hear that Malaysia is planning to develop the Malaysia Digital Inclusiveness Index during the mid-term review of the 12th Malaysia Plan.
Over the years, I have worked with various agencies and stakeholders to create digital services. Creating digital services should not be done just to meet his KPIs within the company.
Finally, the digitalization of services should serve to provide citizens with alternative channels to access government and services, rather than completely replacing them. It is also ideal to reduce waiting times and simplify and automate processes. It is also designed for the masses.
What do you need to do to build your services agilely so that they can be delivered quickly, flexibly, and remain resilient to problems and crises?
Application designers or solution architects need to rethink how they approach application design for digital services.
Developers must learn how to develop these services using new development methodologies, such as agile development methodologies and rapid application development (RAD), a condensed development process. You need to develop microservices or API-oriented applications so that you can quickly introduce new features and remain resilient during spikes in demand.
When the number of users increases rapidly, developers need to consider how their applications will behave and how many resources they should allocate without impacting the user experience.
One piece of advice I would suggest is to hire a good UX designer and use an approach like design thinking to create your user interface. This saves a lot of time and effort, and if the user experience is user-friendly and inclusive, it helps create stickiness. You should also remember that some users have different abilities.
Agencies can also use cloud environments to host their digital services, allowing them to scale up or down to meet demand.
How do you ensure that your digital services are easy to use, accessible, and citizen-centric?
While the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of many digital services, it has also exposed the weaknesses of building those services too quickly.
As mentioned earlier, digital services must be designed with the public in mind, especially the user experience. We often design user experiences from a technical perspective. Apple is a great example of how they design their services and devices to be user-friendly. Multilingual support is essential in Malaysia.
Running these services on a public cloud like Google Cloud allows citizens to access them from anywhere, on any device. Automatically scale to accommodate user spikes and scale down to save costs when no one is evaluating your service.
When talking to developers, I always ask why someone would want to reinvent something that has already been developed and offered at a low price. For example, cloud service providers such as Google Cloud have developed advanced technologies for Generative AI and offer them through fully supported APIs.
What are the challenges of working with multiple government agencies and other vendors that need to collaborate on a digitalization project like this?
One of the major challenges is the lack of a governance framework to securely share and exchange data. Data is not stored in a common format, making it difficult to share it without transforming and mapping it. Of course, these days it's easier because agencies share it in their JSON or XML format via their API calls.
You also need to identify which institutions will be the data owners (providers) of different types of data and will need to provide updates to the users (subscribers) of the data.
Although data exchange platforms like MyGDX have been introduced for data exchange, the adoption rate is not very high. A lot of important information that is useful to other agencies is generated and stored by different agencies, but the process of getting data owners to agree to exchange and share their information across multiple agencies appears to be complex.
How can data help predict the needs of the public, and how do we balance the use of data with the need to protect sensitive public data?
You need to be able to collect and analyze data that covers diverse demographics. These can occur through businesses, transactions with government agencies, the movement of people, or simply the exchange of data between agencies.
At the same time, citizens, businesses, and governments around the world must ensure that everyone can live their lives freely without fear that their information will be stolen or held to ransom by cybercriminals and other malicious actors. , agree that technology should be available.
As a citizen myself, I am also concerned about the safety of my personal data, whether it is stored in Malaysia or not.
Did you know that the fastest way to destroy encrypted data is to destroy the key? No one, including the rightful owner, can access encrypted data without the decryption key. As such, all data stored at rest, in transit, and during processing must be encrypted, and if data is stored in the cloud, keys must be stored outside of the cloud platform. there is.
Another method is to ensure that storage of sensitive and non-sensitive data is separated.
Finally, sharing properly anonymized health data on the cloud is the best way to share data with scientists and doctors around the world for new treatment discovery and research.
Awantech will help your institution develop citizen-centric, sustainable and inclusive solutions at the upcoming event “Johor Conversations: Citizen-centric, Sustainable and Inclusive Johor”, where Lee Wai Teng will be speaking. See how it can help you.
