Trust as Currency

Singapore’s PaaS Moment

GovTech’s presence at the recent ServiceNow Public Sector Forum wasn’t ceremonial. It was a signal. Singapore’s public sector platform-as-a-service (PaaS) landscape is exactly where it needs to be. The heavy lifting on the supply side appears done. Now, the burden shifts to execution, and the timeline is accelerating for agencies to close the gap.

Anyone who has worked in government knows the rhythm of transaction policy: the same services, repeated endlessly, with process refinements measured in years. The traditional remedy has been to throw people, process tweaks, and big technology projects at the problem. PaaS changes that equation. It brings the efficiencies of the “pane of glass” front-end directly in line with the back-end architecture, without forcing agencies to build monoliths or run decade-long custom development programs.

Modernising the core, application rationalisation, or database replatforming is no longer about grand $100+ million, five-year odysseys. The new normal will see projects more easily glide under or through Singapore’s $30 million “significant project” review trigger, enabling agencies to modernise faster, with procurement and architecture evolving together. I don’t think this shift will be just a cost story. It will be a redefinition of how digital transformation gets done in the public sector.

Singapore’s hiTech agencies, GovTech and IMDA, have long been the architectural conscience of the public sector. For over two decades, they’ve championed composable, reusable architecture, treating government systems as modular capabilities rather than one-off builds. This isn’t just governance. It’s active design stewardship. That philosophy is why PaaS lands so cleanly in Singapore today, setting a national baseline that agencies can extend rather than reinvent. They have also cut their teeth on SaaS, so there’s a hard won blueprint for a contemporary approach to executing as-a-service, securely and at scale.

Singapore’s whole-of-government service stack is already living proof of this philosophy. Platforms like Corppass (business digital identity), Singpass (citizen digital identity), Postman (nation-scale communications), SHIP (Smart Nation IoT architecture), and HATS (whole-of-government API testing and security) are more than just utilities. They are shared capabilities designed once, deployed everywhere, and reused across agencies.

I’ve accessed these services myself as an Australian-based contractor working on Singapore government projects, and the impact is unmistakable. The architecture doesn’t just benefit the agencies, it powers an entire, complex, and interconnected delivery ecosystem that spans borders, suppliers, and service providers.

This is exactly where ServiceNow has a strategic opening. Its modular platform components, like case management, workflow automation, integration hubs, and experience layers, are naturally aligned with Singapore’s reusable- and digital first program mindset.

But alignment isn’t enough. The opportunity here is to package these components as whole-of-government capabilities, built once, deployed centrally, and extended at speed across multiple agencies. If ServiceNow seizes that role, it doesn’t just modernise individual departments, it cements itself as the platform that defines the reusable-program standard for digital government.

That could be a strategic inflection point for the company. It’s one that I have no doubt has seen board-level friction and reluctance to go all in on its hitherto elusive platform destiny.

Then there is this.

In Singapore, architecture is never just about code, it is also about trust. As Hefen Wong, Director of Customer Systems and Experience at the Ministry of Manpower, put it: “Trust is the ultimate currency in Singapore.” If you’re a supplier and GovTech trusts you, that trust becomes currency in the Little Red Dot. Some of it measurable in contracts, some of it indirect and impossible to quantify.

What do I mean? Well, because Singapore’s public sector is underpinned by the global system integrator market, that trust doesn’t just move inside the island’s borders. It travels. It shapes the success of international providers in the region, it defines how solutions are designed, and over time, I think it nudges the entire global service provider market toward composable, PaaS-first agentic architectures by default. And a chunk of that with ServiceNow.

In this model, winning in Singapore isn’t just about delivering on island. It’s about setting the standard everywhere.