Singapore's e-government helps smart city construction

Singapore is a global leader in smart city construction, and even launched the Smart Nation 2025 plan. For this plan, Singapore's e-government has played a great role in promoting. Since 2005, Waseda University in Japan has ranked the global economies that provide and use e-government services every year. In the first four years, the US government has been on the top of the list, but since 2009, this record has been broken by Singapore, which has replaced the US as the ranking No. 1 on the list. Waseda University released its 2017 rankings, and Singapore once again topped the list.

Some people may not be very clear about the concept of e-government? Generally speaking, it means that the services provided by the government are transferred from offline to online. What best reflects the changes that e-government has brought to the public is how fast the government can provide services. If you want to develop a piece of land and build a building, you first need to pass the approval of various government departments, and you can start construction only after you get a permit. This process takes 119 days in Europe, 188 days in the Americas, 311 days in China, and 26 days in Singapore, ranking first among 183 countries.

In the current construction of Singapore's e-government, land developers only need to log in to the Singapore construction and real estate network system, and submit all materials at one time, including the Singapore Infocomm Development Authority, Housing Development Board, Land Management Bureau, Construction Bureau, and Land Transport Management. All materials required by 16 government departments, including the Bureau of Environmental Protection, the Gas Bureau, the National Environment Agency, the Public Utilities Bureau, the Fire Protection Bureau, and the Energy Bureau, should be submitted online. The biggest advantage of this system is that these 16 government departments are connected as a whole to conduct parallel approval. The materials you submit may be approved by different departments at the same time. In this way, the results can be obtained in the shortest possible time. However, before the parallel approval, the approval of the building permit in Singapore also takes 106 days. The 845 different types of application forms required for construction permits have been reduced to just over 200 to speed up approvals. Moreover, all paperless approvals have been realized.

At the same time, not only building a house is approved so much faster, but buying a house or opening a restaurant is also very fast. All the materials you need to submit can be solved on the corresponding website for one-stop solution. Even if both the Health Bureau and the Energy Bureau require you to provide proof of income, you only need to provide one. Computer operation, online submission, saves the tedious process of each department separately, which not only improves efficiency, but also saves costs.

Singapore's e-government not only speeds up approval times, it also launched data.gov.sg, a one-stop portal for accessing government open data. Users can access and download more than 11,000 public datasets provided by more than 60 public institutions for research or to create new applications. From each department having its own website, to the government having a single window, Singapore has now developed into the third generation, aiming to create a government that does not need a website and is unpredictable.