e-Government Leadership

Managing the common challenges including rapid urbanisation, building a fundamentally sound financial sector or fostering entrepreneurship and innovation, requires effective governance. Technology is an enabler and essential tool in delivering good governance as it facilitates transparency, accountability, efficiency and productivity.

Participants in this course will learn the key principles needed for the development of IT policies and standards that will support scalability, security, inter-operability, data exchange and integration. It will introduce a framework that enables participants to acquire the skills in identifying IT opportunities and prioritise them. It will also explore how proper IT planning creates long-term business value while optimising IT resources for the organisation – be it for a ministry or department.

Techniques like sense-making will be introduced to help develop technological options for different scenarios. The options will be analysed with an assessment of the range of outcomes in order to select a best course of action that achieves the goals of the organisation.

Strategies for technology acquisition will be discussed. These include considerations for “build”, “buy” or “outsource” decisions, defining and measuring outcome-based service levels and public private partnership models.

Design Thinking seeks to stimulate creative thinking to accelerate effective synthesis of policy, process and technology solutions. Participants will learn concepts of design thinking that will lay the foundation of transformation and help focus on citizens and businesses. Topics on stakeholder management, effective communication and transformational leadership will be introduced and discussed.

The deployment of new technologies, systems, processes will invariably impact the stakeholders and result in changes. Communication of such changes need to be planned carefully so as to ensure human inertia and resistance are overcome, leading to accelerated adoption of the change. Discussion will include critical role of Change Champions, who lead transformation and interactions across administrative compartments in the public sector, stakeholders and interface between public administration and businesses and citizens at large.

IT Governance and Risk Management is the management of the business risk associated with the use, ownership, operations, involvement and influence of IT within an organisation. This segment will highlight the importance of having a sound governance process in managing the IT investment with all stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. Compliance to relevant laws, regulations, contractual agreements and policies will also be discussed.

This programme is designed for extensive interaction and discussions to facilitate exchange of ideas amongst practitioners and experiential learning.

Format

Lectures, workshops and discussions

Class Time

The total duration of the programme is 4 days, structured into 2 segments.

First segment is of 3 days duration, which will cover the topics outlined above.

The second segment will be scheduled for 1 day after 6 weeks. This will allow the participants to apply the concepts and frameworks to real life scenarios in their respective work environment during the 6 weeks. Re-convening for 1 day provides an opportunity for the participants to share their implementation experiences, solicit ideas to address challenges encountered, thus enriching their learning experience.

This course is part of the Digital Leadership Series offered by NUS-ISS.

Key Takeaways

The programme is intended for participants aspiring to cultivate leadership skills to effectively develop and manage technology strategies that are aligned to the organisational goals.

Upon completion of the programme, the participant will be able to understand and apply the concepts of:

• Technology as an enabler for effective governance
• Development of IT policies and standards to enhance the quality of project implementation
• Strategic Management of IT to meet organisational goals
• Leading the Change for an inclusive stakeholder alignment and end user adoption
• Benchmarking and analysis of IT landscape and trends
• IT application, products and services acquisition strategies
• Design Thinking for public service excellence
• IT governance, risk and compliance