Lessons from URA’s Digital Transformation

4 Lessons from URA’s Digital Transformation Experience

With a land mass of just over 730 square kilometres, Singapore is one of the smallest countries in the world. Facing limited land and sea space, Singapore’s development needs to not only be able to meet the needs of a country, but also that of a city. In this respect, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) plays an active role in addressing challenges similarly faced by countries all over the world – shaping Singapore into a great city to live, work and play.

CHING TUAN YEE

Director, Design & Planning Lab, Urban Redevelopment Authority

Recognising the enabling effect of technology on internal users and external customers, Singapore’s land use planning and conservation authority, URA, embarked on our digital transformation journey in the 1980s. Over the years, the rollout of various digital planning tools has enhanced productivity and empowered easy collaboration among our stakeholders. Looking back, it is apparent that several key ingredients and digital planning tools have been instrumental in our transformative journey.

LESSON 1: A COMPREHENSIVE APPLICATION FRAMEWORK AND A COMMON VISION

URA’s technology and tools serve the needs and functions of multiple business groups. Therefore, it is important that users and developers are able to see the sum of parts and how they are interlinked with one another in a common vision. Complementing this is a Formulate-Implement-Review (FIR) closed-loop framework that maps key upstream-downstream business functions, and ensures that applications and tools integrate and work together synergistically while fulfilling their individual purpose.

At the organisational level, these tools collectively contribute to the development of an integrated systemsapplication-data roadmap for URA, which enables the identification of priority areas, and the connecting and sharing of technology applications and ideas across business groups. Individually, these tools facilitate evidence-based evaluation of planning scenarios, provide better insights to support decision-making, enable easy collaboration, enhance productivity, and improve customer service.

HOW DOES THE FORMULATE-IMPLEMENT-REVIEW FRAMEWORK WORK?

Formulate

Tools offering analytical insights, and scenario creation and assessment through modelling and simulation (e.g. 2D-3D GIS, ePlanner, iPlan).

Implement

Tools facilitating development and infrastructure planning, implementation and coordination, and regulatory processes (e.g. OneTool).

Review

Tools supporting ground sentiment analysis and trend monitoring, and closing the loop for plan formulation (e.g. ePlanner).

LESSON 2: AN AGILE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION APPROACH

An agile design and implementation approach that takes into account maintenance, sustainability and future adaptability and scalability is necessary to ensure the relevance and longevity of tools.

Beginning with the user journey, the developing team engages with multidisciplinary project teams, comprising business users and product managers, to identify gaps for process improvements and introduction of innovative features. Through proofs-ofconcept, prototypes and developing minimum viable products (MVPs), business users see their needs met and provide feedback for further enhancement, creating a success spiral.

Case in point – our ePlanner is the result of collaboration between different project teams. By assigning these sprint teams to different topics such as housing, greenery, sociocommunity facilities, etc., ePlanner layers supporting planning analytics under the Master Plan Review were developed and enhanced.

Then as part of the product roadmap, we continue to anticipate new needs and conceptualise ideas to bring new functionalities to users. For instance, to facilitate better planning, we are currently exploring the integration of 2D-3D functions into ePlanner to assist planners and urban designers in analysing their scenarios.

LESSON 3: AN END-TO-END DATA PERSPECTIVE

Accessibility to good quality data is essential for business analytics and supporting the planning at different FIR stages. For example, the ability to extract and integrate 3D Building Information Modelling (BIM) submission models from case processing systems allows planners to better evaluate development proposals or formulate urban design plans upstream.

To enable this however, it is necessary to have an end-to-end data perspective involving the specification and capturing of data enabled through individual system design within a system-ofsystems wide data architecture. Data interoperability and policy and standards compliance at URA are ensured through a comprehensive data governance and management framework, involving a structured review of data schema design during the system development phase.

LESSON 4: CONTINUOUS CAPABILITY BUILDING

Our people are at the core of our transformational efforts, and intentional efforts to build organisational capability are instrumental to sustained success. That is why we seek to equip our officers at the intersection of planning and technology domains by encouraging them to build up team and individual competencies and skills through a combination of training courses, learning journeys, sharing and exchanges.

Our leaders lead by recognising and tapping on one another’s strengths and expertise to encourage cross-team interactions, and inspire and galvanise staff towards a common shared vision. Through encouraging a culture of innovation, experimentation and sharing, ideas contributed are quickly tested, developed and brought to production.

We also work in close partnership with internal and external partners to share resources and know-how, as well as build and multiply synergies to deliver highquality products which meet user needs.

Digital transformation is a continual journey. We will continue to harness new technologies and enhance our digital tools to serve evolving needs.

URA’S TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY – A SNAPSHOT

1989 – 2002

The Integrated Land Use System and its successor,

Integrated Planning and Land Use System (iPlan)

utilised geographic information systems (GIS) to support planning processes, which enabled quicker information retrieval and analytical functions. The use was limited to a small group of specialists.

1999

The Electronic Development Application (EDA) system transformed the industry by changing to a fully electronic and Computer Aided Design (CAD) submission workflow, which reduced manual and hardcopy processing and conveyance.

New GIS technologies saw the beginning of 2D and 3D data integration, and opened new avenues in land use and infrastructure planning, urban design and analyses. More users came onboard to learn how to use these technologies.

The implementation of new web-based digital planning tools such as ePlanner and OneTool further improved access to data and supported collaborative workflows. This marked the start of mainstream usage of data analytics for urban planning in Singapore. Joint labs with partner agencies and entities widened interest in data driven planning and enticed more users to tap on digital planning tools.

URA’s ePlanner serves more than 1,500 users across 40 agencies, providing over 100 layers of visualised data and supporting various queries.