ADEX Case Study

ADEX - Empowering Innovation within our Smart City

“We sought to get ahead of the curve, when we launched the Smart Nation initiative in 2014 – to use technology to create new opportunities and to better the lives of our people.” - Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat

Singapore is known globally for being a tech-forward city and has topped the IMD-SUTD¹ Smart City Index for three years running in 2021. Government Technology Agency (GovTech) plays a crucial role in driving Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative by empowering the whole of government to design, develop and deliver digital services that are built for our citizens and businesses.

Unlocking Whole-of-Government real-time data

Government agencies in Singapore process petabytes of data from a myriad of sources each day to a wide audience of public and private stakeholders. Connecting the right people with the data that they need is a challenge and there are often lags while data is being processed. Agencies and corporations often need to access different publication streams and collate data from multiple sources to create workable solutions.

GovTech created Asynchronous Data Exchange (or ADEX), a platform for real-time, fire-and-forget data transfer to address these problems. ADEX provides a data sharing marketplace by offering a central exchange service for agencies and other stakeholders. With ADEX, agencies can now browse datasets across the Whole-of-Government (WOG) and use them collaboratively. This enables easy exchange of data across the government, aggregating data collection for richer insights that would help develop evidence-based policy and monitor operations.

The copious data collected by various agencies often existed in silos due to the manual process needed to publish and access it. Now, an agency can publish a data stream to ADEX, providing real-time data to anyone who needs it. With authorization and secure transfer process in place, agencies can upload and access data safely and securely through the ADEX platform. This opens up a whole new set of possibilities for the accessing of shared data across various government agencies.

ADEX will also automatically deliver new data to subscribers so agencies can receive timely updates from appropriate data sources. The asynchronous mode of transfer even decouples the request-response, allowing shorter processing time for each message.

ADEX system is being recognized by IDC Smart City Asia Pacific Awards and emerged as the winner under the Administration category for the year 2022. In addition, ADEX has also clinched the Best in Future of Connectedness award at the IDC Future Enterprise Awards 2022 for Singapore.

Example of SenseOps: Painting a picture with data consumed from ADEX

SenseOps is a visualisation and dashboarding app that integrates real-time data from different sources onto a single platform for situational awareness. Developed in 2020 in response to COVID-19, the SenseOps platform helps government agencies to improve safe distancing and management efforts through inter-agency planning, coordination, and reporting. The provision of core real-time data needed to support the mission of SenseOps is powered backend by ADEX.

A fully customisable platform, SenseOps allows each agency to superimpose data onto a map or translate it into comprehensible dashboard that makes analysing massive datasets much more easily. SenseOps has helped agencies visualise hotspots and identify trends in safe distancing cases. This has allowed agencies to deploy Safe Distancing Ambassadors to hotspots more efficiently and increase the outreach and education of safe distancing measures to the public.

Improving safe management operations with data visualisation

Smart data took on increased importance during the COVID-19 crisis when it became essential to understand the ground situation in real-time. Even with TraceTogether facilitating contact tracing efforts, safe management operations required significant human resources to understand crowd flows and how best to deploy the resources available. Government agencies used SenseOps to ease daily planning of safe distancing operations and automate reporting.

With ADEX as the backbone in providing the enforcement data, SenseOps supports the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment (MSE) as Secretariat and the Safe Distancing Taskforce (SDTF) agencies in identifying enforcement hotspots for more focused deployment of resources. On top of it, it enables consolidation of enforcement statistics for daily sitrep reporting on one single platform, thus cutting down on time spent on manual consolidation needed.

Reaching Smart Nation objectives with ADEX

Data is only as good as its usability.

The Singapore government has progressively built up digital infrastructure and engineering capability that enable us to respond decisively and swiftly to the COVID-19 outbreak. The network of TraceTogether, SafeEntry, ADEX and SenseOps came together at a critical moment to combat a global crisis.

The usage of ADEX as the backend platform for data sharing has enabled fast deployment of SenseOps that helps to provide critical data for swift decision-making and facilitated the coordinated responses between multiple agencies.

If you’re from a government agency, click here to log in to ADEX’s self-service portal and experience real-time data at your fingertips.

¹Published by Swiss business school Institute of Management Development (IMD) and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), the Smart City Index ranks 118 cities by how “smart” they are.

Last updated 16 December 2022