The Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore builds a modern, digital, G2B engagement platform.

The Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore (MTI) has found the balance to meet targeted plans and scaled delivery, industry-wide goals and actionable strategies, a whole of government approach and an agency’s specific priorities. They did it through a collaborative, digital platform that serves as an example for any department, agency, or ministry looking to:

• Strengthen collaboration and enhance the user experience — externally with businesses and internally between agencies.
• Leverage a broader range of subject matter expertise across various agencies to accomplish more effective, targeted and timely support to businesses (versus trying to become overnight experts in everything, all at once)
• Advance and grow digital solutions, bringing data and information together into a single platform and source, reusing capabilities, and building a foundation for today’s and tomorrow’s work

“A stronger Government-to-Business relationship is critical in sustaining Singapore’s competitiveness, which is why the work the team delivered here is so important. To facilitate timely support to businesses more effectively and efficiently.” said Sharon Ng, Ministry Family CIO, Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore.

MTI’s mission is to promote economic growth and create good jobs, to enable Singaporeans to improve their lives. Together with its statutory boards, the Ministry ensures that Singapore's economy continues to be competitive, is able to attract investments, and nurture a deeper base of global Singapore enterprises.

It also plays a role in supporting Singapore’s Smart Nation vision aimed at transforming the country into a technologically advanced and digitally connected society. Harnessing technology , data and innovation to foster economic growth and to effect transformation in government services and businesses a reality.

“We are focused on fostering digital leadership to build an ever-ready organisation and cultivate a strong innovative culture to support Singapore's Smart Nation Vision.” Sharon Ng, Ministry Family CIO, Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore.

MTI is a diverse, multifaceted organisation. Its ministry family is made up of nine statutory boards and one government department under the Ministry’s purview. This diverse focus across MTI’s work brings a profound impact on the economy. And this means Ng and her team have an equally profound responsibility for delivery.

“Government procurement is an art,” said Ng. “In any large-scale implementation, it is often a complex process to navigate and go broader beyond, to combine efforts and pool resources across multiple agencies versus procuring just for an agency’s own needs.”

The result: duplicative work, duplicative investments, and duplicative data – often in an unstructured format. The impact: opportunity costs in a number of areas with rather lasting effects, especially right now as we look at the next wave of technological innovation.

• Speed | AI is re-shaping just about every industry seemingly overnight because in this “post-digital” era, where digital processes and operations are the new normal, we finally have enough data points to fuel real, statistically significant recommendations. Organisations that still store their information in different format (or worse yet in analog and/or offline formats) will suddenly find themselves lapped because it takes time to build the amount of data AI needs — and then of course add on the time that the procurement and implementation process will take thereafter.
• Scale | Organisations running on different platforms make it harder to leverage one another’s insights, best practices, points of synergy, and more. Ways to recognise if this is happening: do customers have to call more than one team to answer a question or solve a problem? Do those answers or solutions have similar governance and compliance requirements, yet vastly different processes and workflows to uncover them? Are employees spending time on clerical work like uploading data or building reports manually?
• Sustainability | If an application or enhancement is made to one system, it often needs to be rebuilt, retest and redeployed across legacy systems.

“We pulled together a cross functional team across agencies to ideate and looked at what would be needle movers to help transform Government to business experience across the work at MTI ministry family. As a result, the team took a platform approach to design a solution that can scale and have the potential be able to be leveraged across the whole of government.” Ng continued.

Ng and her team launched BizEngage, an integrated Government-to-Business engagement platform on the Salesforce Customer 360 for Public Sector. It gives MTI the tools to bring its many teams, data, and areas of expertise together in support of a collaborative “tell me once” approach.

Here's how it works:

Intake | When a business or members of public is in need of support (enquiries about agencies’ policies and initiatives) they are able to submit their queries to BizEngage built on Service Cloud. Engagement | Once the queries are in, customer service officers can review and browse Knowledge articles for best practices to guide and solve frequently asked queries and provide adequate responses. These will be stored in a centralised knowledge repository, which helps to achieve efficient customer service. Service delivery | If there is a question or support action to follow up, a push notification is sent to the relevant team assigned to the case. The assigned team will respond using Chatter. They can also access additional real time information via Salesforce Connect without having to leave the BizEngage environment. Analytics | Reports and dashboards built on CRM Analytics give the team the ability to report on services delivered, surface patterns, spot trends, pinpoint catalysts, and deliver data driven insights about the services that have the biggest impact on businesses driving Singapore’s economy. AI | Einstein extends this data-driven strategy further, which makes predictions and case recommendations based on previous results. For example, if similar case was submitted by MoP or business before, Einstein serves up the finding as a recommendation. Platform-level services | Feedback Management collects survey data across touch points, helping MTI fine tune the customer experience. If that refinement calls for a new feature or app, the team can test it out in Sandbox before pushing it live to the larger organisation. Data Mask offers an additional layer of security to this test environment, while Security Centre and Shield offer governance, platform encryption, event monitoring, two-factor authentication capabilities, and more across the live environment. “Our team did a proof of concept in three weeks , and BizEngage went live in 90 days after that. Teams stayed focused on overcoming critical milestones and business problems, without boiling the ocean,” said Ng.

Starting with a proof of concept is just 1 of 5 best practices the MTI demonstrates in this work — best practices that make a great to-do list for your next digital transformation effort.

Download Checklist >

The strategy that Ng and her team put together to unify MTI ministry family agencies took on more of a whole of government approach. “Leaders are brought into the vision of empowering a connected and agile future that unifies digital transformation for collective progress across whole of government” Ng added.

Other results include...

• 65% increase in user adoption in Business Engagement
• 80% increase in leads/events and case management adoption
• 31% gain in productivity
• 20% faster service delivery
• Faster time-to-market – by 9 months
• Reduction in ongoing expenses (deploying and maintaining multiple CRMs), saving MTI an estimated $11.7 million over 5 years
• Reduction in contractual expenses, saving MTI an estimated $2 to 3 million annually.
• Contextualised customer interactions with actionable, up-to-date, personalised call reports for employees
• Expanded enterprise capacity for economic transformation.
• More frequent, data-driven collaboration with vendors, partners, and agencies across the mission

...as well as a great bonus:

• The entire team was enabled with new skills. Some individuals became Salesforce certified, others stepped into bigger roles, and everyone learned how a 360-degree customer-first strategy across people, process, and technology helps them make an impact individually.

“The ability to accelerate innovation, develop quickly, and continue to build on the BizEngage digital experience will help more than MTI,” said Ng. “It gives public sector a new way to collaborate, a new way to create efficiencies, and a new way to bring more value-added services to businesses driving our economy.”