CE’s fireside chat at GovInsider’s Festival of Innovation 2021

"One big lesson I learned and very heartened to is the great strength and resilience in VITAL staff. I told them we may have to go into a full lockdown, they knew exactly what to do. They had all their plans in place. All I had to do was encourage them, motivate them and if there were small roadblocks, push away for them.

Looking ahead, the second lesson will be how to emerge stronger. One of the key things that we needed to do was to institutionalise this resilience and strength in my staff, and harness the energy going forward, because it is no longer business as usual today. We are gonna live in a world of endemic."

"The concept of VITAL being an ops tech leader leads to two areas of opportunities, first being VITAL as a platform, and second, VITAL as a partner.

At this central position as a platform, with all the transactions coming in, we are aggregating and achieving economies of scale. That is part one. Part two is what we can do when we bring all these transactions together, such that we can create greater value out of this. So by playing a leadership role, we can actively transform the way corporate services are being done. We are here to help set standards, push boundaries, and leverage on our unique position at the centre."

"As the robotics and automation lead, we need to ask ourselves how do we harness the collective good work done by more than 100 public agencies, bring them together in a platform so that we can cross learn, collaborate and co-create new ideas. In fact, we have an app called RPA Bot Library for the entire public service, and we are trying to expand that into a robotics automation hub, where we want to extend beyond RPA.

Second part will be we need VITAL at the centre to champion some of these changes that we want to bring in through the use of technology. As a platform, once we create something at the centre, it can be scaled up for use by the rest of government agencies."

"We see ourselves taking a leadership role in exploring technologies that will benefit the HR, finance and procurement domain. We see ourselves in an experimental role, and a platform role.

Because we know the pains across, we are able to curate and put together the use cases. If there is no immediate technology available, our role is like an innovation or use case hub. I am really open and welcome the private sector. Tell us your problem, your technology and the pain points you can solve. That will allow us to make the connections as a platform, because we are the central agency for shared services."

"You need to invest and make sure that people come along with you, and get the correct training. We are no longer transactional in nature. We are a central agency to create more value for the ecosystem.

Internally within VITAL, we have a shared services competency framework that identifies the areas of competency that we need to upskill our staff. It is a very systematic way we analyse the roles our officers need to fill going forward in this new environment, and we curate, design and send them back to school (for training)."

You may view CE’s fireside chat by clicking this link.