Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

While digital transformation in government agencies is still a priority, the cost is still a big issue when it comes to investing in new technologies. At most times, it’s always a lengthy procurement process of buying a ready service to be deployed and managed by a third-party operator. However, this all changes with the cloud enables governments and their agencies to be more flexible and agile in their tech delivery.

According to Dr Mohd Fahmi Ngah, Managing Director of the Smart Selangor Delivery Unit, their cloud framework focuses on four smart domains that infuse technologies and smart solutions – with citizen centricity at the heart of making a smart state by 2025 a reality. And it has been proving to be successful with not only benefiting citizens but also allowing the state to manage its budget.

Dr Fahmi explained that despite their budget, the state was able to work with AWS starting from 2018 and continues to harness AWS technology in services to develop more tools and applications for the state. Among them is the scalable platform CEPAT, which was able to integrate a variety of payment methods for state and municipality services.

He added, they soon realised the need for the state to have its own disaster recovery centre. There are currently 48 state agencies, each with its unique servers. They needed to have a centralised unit to be able to derive insights from all this data.

“AWS has been helping us with our hybrid cloud disaster recovery centre. This data centre will consolidate all the agencies within the state. It is expected to be ready by the end of November. Local councils will also shift their workloads there.”

On the concerns of data privacy and compliance, Dr Fahmi explained that the government is classifying more of its data as most of the data they have are not restricted – white file data. The centre will also be used to improve real-time data analytics for the state’s smart city agenda. This includes the ability to monitor CCTVs in public areas for real-time enforcement, as they will be able to process real-time unstructured data with real-time analytics.

Interestingly, Dr Fahmi also pointed out the challenges in the recent water problems in the state. As the state government plans to use drones to scout the rivers, the challenge they are going to face is managing all the data collected and leading enforcement. Currently, the only tech they have is still at date collection level for raw water.

“There is still a tech limitation. The recent water problems were caused by smell and we need sensors that are able to detect the smell. We are still in the market trying to find the right smell sensors.”

The success of the Smart Selangor Delivery Unit was featured in the recent AWS Public Sector Summit Online. The Selangor state government is also actively showcasing their technology in handling the state’s digital infrastructure with both the federal government and other state governments.

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