Speaking at an industry briefing attended by more than 700 industry participants, Chan Yeng Kit, chief executive officer of the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore, said, 'Continual investment in infocomm technologies for the public sector is essential as there is a constant need for the government to exploit the potential of infocomm technologies for operational efficiencies.'

Some of the key projects for FY06 include a multi-million-dollar Human Resource Transformation project by the Ministry of Defence (Mindef); the Facility Management Bulk Tender to provide professional IT manpower services for the Singapore government (IDA); the integrated Security System for the Changi Prison Complex (Ministry of Home Affairs); the Student Hub to migrate student information to an open platform (Ministry of Education); and the new Human Resource and Finance System by the National Library Board.

For Mindef alone, the estimated procurement value for its Corporate IT will be about S$200 million. This covers both capital and operational costs.

Besides the Human Resource Transformation project, other key Mindef infocomm initiatives include a refresh of the Situational Test system (estimated value less than S$500,000), Service Management Center refresh (estimated value in the S$5 million -$10 million bracket), Network Security Components (S$3 million -$10 million), Integrated Transport Information System (S$3 million - $10 million) and a 3G SAF Learning Management System (S$3 million -$10 million). Mindef's total corporate IT budget for the next five years is S$1.2 billion - $1.5 billion.

IDA itself is driving service-wide projects such as the Facility Management Services Bulk Tender aimed at facilitating the procurement of IT support services for government ministries and statutory boards. The project will involve the provision of professional manpower for managing the government's IT facilities and supporting ad hoc service requests. It will exclude SOE components such as infrastructure level services involving, for example, print and file servers and network servers. The open tender for the project, which has an estimated procurement value of over S$10 million, is expected to be called in March 2007.