Josephine Teo: recommendation

Transcript context

…City-state. City-state. When you're referring to the government, well, is the government, no one asks, okay, is it the federal government or is it the local government? So that in itself is greatly facilitative already. The second thing is that we do have a strong culture of cooperating across different ministries. In the digital domain, you absolutely have to, because it's not just my ministry that is interested in seeing applications being developed and percolate throughout our system. If you are the Ministry of Transport, you'd be very interested how artificial intelligence, machine learning can be applied to the rail system to help it to advance from corrective maintenance where you go in and maintain equipment after they've broken down to preventive maintenance, which is still costly because you can't go around maintaining everything preventatively. So how do you prioritize? If you use machine learning to prioritize and move more effectively into predictive maintenance, then potentially you can have a more reliable rail system without it costing a lot more. So Ministry of Transport would have this set of considerations and they have to be willing to support innovations in their particular sector. In healthcare, there would be equally a different set of considerations. How can machine learning, how can AI algorithms be applied to help physicians, not to overtake physicians? I don't think physicians can be overtaken so easily, not at all for the imaginable future. But can it help them with diagnosis? Can it help them with treatment plans? What constitutes an optimized treatment plan that would take into consideration the patient's whole set of health indicators? And how does a physician look at all these inputs and still apply judgment? Those are the areas that we would be very interested in as MDDI, but equally, I think, my colleagues in the Ministry of Health. So the way in which we organize ourselves must allow for ownership to also be taken by our colleagues, that they want to push it forward. We keep ourselves relatively lean. At the broad level, we may say there's a group of colleagues who looked at digital economy, another group that looks at digital society, another group looks at digital government. But actually, there are many occasions where you have to be cross-disciplinary. Even digital government, the more you digitalize your service delivery to citizens, the more you have to think about the security architecture, the more you have to think about whether this delivery mechanism is resilient. And you can't do it in isolation. You have to then say, if the standards that we set for ourselves are totally dislocated with what the industry does, how hyperscalers go about architecting their security, then the two are not interoperable. e to then say, if the standards that we set for ourselves are totally dislocated with what the industry does, how hyperscalers go about architecting their security, then the two are not interoperable. So a degree of flexibility, a way of allowing people to take ownership of the areas that come within their charge, and very importantly, constantly building bridges, and also encouraging a culture of not saying that, here's where my job stops. In a field that is, as you say, developing as quickly as it does, you can't rigidly say that, beyond this, not my problem. It is your problem until you find somebody else to take care of it.…

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