OneUnified System Starter Pack

See the full deck on Google Slides.

Watch our Finale presentation on YouTube!

What is OneUnified System Starter Pack?

A collection of resources to empower public officers when modernising their agency’s legacy systems.

What motivated you to build this product?

Agencies are commonly running on silo-ed legacy systems that have not been updated in years. This leads to inefficiencies, such as manual data transfer between systems. Many times, an officer has to open multiple tabs just to do 1 action.

While agencies are aware of this problem, they usually assign laymen public officers to this gargantuan task, who do not have the appropriate expertise or domain knowledge for it. These officers are hence intimidated by the scale and don’t know where to even begin. Usually, the result is either too abstract or becomes outdated by the time of actualisation.

As part of OGP’s mission to evangelise the rest of the government to modernise their tech processes, we see an opportunity to give our own advice and principles on how to get out of this situation, and what type of system architecture agencies should be moving towards to ensure a long-lasting solution.

What tech stack did you use?

We host this content on Isomer to keep it out of email inboxes, and easily accessible to all officers and even members of the public.

What were the key challenges you faced in building OneUnifiedSystem?

Penning down our thoughts was difficult, especially ensuring it was in language easily understood by the layman officer since we are trying to explain more complex technical talk to individuals who are not as familiar.

It also took us a while to understand the user journey for the procurement process, as well as discover the various routes and options you can take at each step.

What is the product vision for OneUnifiedSystem?

We hope this starter pack can help accelerate the digital transformation of agencies, and also stop the cycle of silo-ed systems constantly being built every few years, wasting taxpayer money.

Since this is a common problem across several agencies, the knowledge from the pack can be used across various agencies. We also aim to collaborate with other agencies and find existing resources already made available, and use this platform to help collate and leverage on them.

Fun facts!

One interesting finding: It was interesting to map out all the different aspects one would have to think of when trying to push for such a change. What started out looking like just tech advice was actually influenced by multiple factors, and we branched out into sections on change management, stakeholder buy-in, and mindset shifting amongst others.

One thing you'd have done differently:

Spoken to more agencies to find resources that we ourselves could use as a starting point, instead of starting from scratch!

Takeaway/learnings:

Digital transformation is a long and arduous process – It is not just the adoption of a single tech solution. There is no finishing line or clear endpoint, instead, we can only keep improving and making sure we set up infrastructure to support this initiative.

The impact also may not be immediately apparent, but can gradually appear in small everyday micro-interactions. At the end of the day, while things still get done, there is much we can do to improve the quality of life of staff, who are our best resource. Agencies need to invest more than just money into the problem, but also time and resources.