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Central Government, Policy

Sharing in govt: HK Vs Singapore

By Robin Hicks | 29 June 2010

It’s good to share. But in government, sharing information between departments is not always easy, as a FutureGov Research survey of officials in Hong Kong and Singapore reveals.

Joined-up government, which is high on the policy agendas in both Hong Kong and Singapore, depends to a large extent on how information is shared between departments. A study by FutureGov Research, sponsored by TIBCO, found that Hong Kong government departments were less likely to share information with each other than were Singaporean government entities.

While 17 per cent of Singaporean public sector executives said that they expected the diversity of shared information between government entities to grow between 76-100 per cent of cases in the future, only 11 per cent said the same in Hong Kong. And almost 20 per cent of officials in Hong Kong said they would “never” share information with other departments.

Of course, policy differences between Hong Kong and Singapore help explain the willingness (or lack thereof) to share information between departments. Some information simply cannot be shared by law. But the overall trend is that, in practice, government departments in both Singapore and Hong Kong could share information more often than they do.

The survey found that while more than half of respondents in Singapore and Hong Kong said that they share information between departments often, more than one quarter said they only share data sometimes, and 23 per cent said no, they do not share at all. Why?

Respondents said that their current workflow did not involve other agencies, or they lacked the software systems needed to collaborate with others. Information security emerged as the key issue that would hinder data sharing among delegates in Hong Kong, which has suffered a number of very high profile data leakages in recent years. In Singapore, however, a whole-of-government directive to share information has encouraged greater transfer of data between departments.

“We share a lot,” said one Singapore official. “Cost is an issue, but so is the risk of data languishing in silos.”

Policy differences aside, public sector workers in Hong Kong and Singapore agreed that information sharing was not a technical issue, and required a mindset shift to create a greater sharing culture.

“If you are willing to share you must be willing to expose yourself,” one Singaporean official told FutureGov. “You need to take a risk to get a return. Data will give you back, but it has a shelf life and must be used.”

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