A Year of Moments
We started with moments of looking ahead
My prologue starts with creation, as did 2022. COVID swept us off our feet last year and kept us on our toes this year. We aptly began the year by imagining all the new things we wanted to do in the next 5 years and into a huge cauldron went our inspirations, innovative thinking and the wisdom of the Faculty Advisory Group led by Prof Bernard Tan. Aligning with NUS’ Strategy and Strategic Priorities for 2023-27, we cogitated the thrusts and challenges and developed the NUS IT Strategic Plan (ITSP), a blueprint that sets the course for the next 5 years of innovation and technology leadership.
Moments of empowerment
Digitally empowering education, we launched the Curriculum Management System (CMS), which managed 20,000 curriculum modules. Used by our faculties and schools, this single source of truth has brought about an estimated savings of 950 man-days. The campus also saw the new Canvas, which will replace LumiNUS as the Learning Management System come 2023. We’ve soft-launched Canvas and you can now find about 900 courses with over 100,000 enrolments.
In our canteens, our Smart Dining System helps our staff and students order their food remotely, and get notified through the app or queue screens when food is ready. To date, we have seen almost 15,000 downloads and over 22,000 mobile orders.
uNivUS is NUS’ super app connecting NUS staff, students and alumni with useful information and services. It provides a seamless, mobile experience to enhance the campus life of uNivUS users, even as they transit from students to alumni/staff to lifelong learners. This year, we added an inbox to provide an alternative channel to communicate with students. We have also made available the Student Peer Supporter Chat that can connect students with fellow student peer supporters. The Event Aggregator provides a list of events for the NUS community, making it easy for users to see all that’s happening on our vibrant campus. All these features and more were available to the Alumni community when we onboarded them this year.
In the near future, uNivUS will be found on the web too. In all, you can look forward to more personalisation, greater conveniences and a new world of experiences.
Moments of enrichment
The Digital Enablement (DE) programme raises the digital dexterity of the NUS community by introducing new digital tools and technology. This year alone, we conducted a total of 77 sharing sessions and equipped over 2,500 staff with new technology skills. The team also organised the inaugural DE’Hackathon 2022 where over 50 participants from 18 departments emerged with technology solutions that are expected to save 5,000 man-days. 100 staff were also awarded DE digital badges for being both MODEL departments and DE ambassadors.
Within NUS IT, we moved closer to being a future-ready IT workforce and completed a competency framework which put together over 200 functional, core and technical skills and know-how. Post-assessment, we are now able to glean insights into our capabilities and curate personalised training plans to augment the department’s proficiency.
Moments of outstanding administration
The NUService Hub is a unified platform for administrative departments to manage HR, Procurement and Finance service requests. It even has a chatbot (“BoTBoT”) that has since handled over 4,000 users who’ve logged almost 60,000 tickets.
The UAS2 Administrator Portal manages admission, scholarship and financial aid applications. In this year’s modernisation and consolidation exercise, we estimate we’ll save over $410,000 per annum.
The team also rolled out a new finance system (FS2) that came with best practices, and faster analytics insights, bringing about the agility needed to support NUS’ rapid growth in demand.
Moments we got bigger, faster and steadier
Through NUSNET6, our extensive campus network has seen a transformational upgrade, bringing us bigger bandwidth, faster speed, and more reliable performance. The award-winning Outdoor Wireless project has a set-up that utilises 5G to provide backhaul connectivity for outdoor wireless hotspots. Powered by solar energy, each “box” is self-sufficient and resource-efficient and epitomises innovative solutioning.
In addition, we expanded the research data storage service so we could provide a centralised and secured on-demand service to store our research data. We also partnered with commercial cloud service providers to promote advanced computing technologies that will accelerate researchers’ work and give us a competitive edge in the research field.
Moments of reality
Through machine learning, the Creative AI app trains nursing students to communicate professionally in clinical settings within a 3D virtual environment. Over 500 students from the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies have benefited from Creative AI, and its outstanding achievement earned the team an “NUS Annual Digital Education Award 2022”. The ELISA 3D app simulates complex construction structures in 3D for Civil Engineering students, enabling them to reiteratively test and deploy designs in civil engineering without real-life consequences.
Moments of customer delight
We launched the NUS IT Care Voice Bot in April 2022 with voice recognition and natural language processing capabilities, serving as the first touchpoint for users for IT Care hotline users. Since its launch, we’ve seen an avoidance of over 3,000 tickets with an estimated cost savings of almost $80,000.
Moments we felt “safe”
NUS IT completed a total of 6 phishing simulation drills targeted at all University staff and students. By adopting a holistic approach in these drills, we reinforced good cyber behaviour through gift tokens, and educate the susceptible through remedial drills and training sessions. Consequently, our average click rates for staff and students improved from 14.6% and 10.4% in 2021 to 6.5% and 5.7% in 2022 respectively.
To offer management oversight, we also created a dashboard for senior management to view the overall drill performance.
Moments we felt young again
You couldn’t possibly feel old in an organisation that’s filled with over 30,000 youths. Over the past few years, NUS IT has met with success in our internship programme, bringing in the best of our own to learn, grow and work with us. Since 2018, NUS IT’s internship programme has taken on more than 90 interns to work on over 60 different projects. Our students found it easy to integrate into a culture that was receptive, warm and ready to share, and experienced meaning in co-creating the very apps and systems they’ve been using on campus. We were delighted to lead them into the working world where they had a vast array of the latest technology to dabble with. And if what we had wasn’t enough, we collaborated with industry partners like the Red Hat Academy, to enable NUS students to obtain certification in open source, fully sponsored. Students in this programme will have access to the learning community, connect with instructors and other learners, and can learn at their own pace, time and place.
Moments we were there for each other
IT isn’t all about the work, of course. Over the year, we planted trees, donated blood, cleaned the beach, and launched our annual “Do your bIT for charITy ”, where NUS can purchase our mascot bITbIT’s merchandise to help our students in need of financial assistance.
This year, we organised many programmes that targeted our staff’s well-being. We worked with UHC to bring “deskercise” training to NUS IT and ran several talks on stress management and physical wellness. On top of that, NUS IT contributed one of the largest numbers as a single department to have participated in the Peer Staff Support scheme, creating a community of peer support and care for colleagues in need.
Moments of pride and joy
The NUS IT team had never been given more opportunities to share our expertise, knowledge and experience in a myriad of forums. Every month since the beginning of the year, we‘ve received invitations to speak, be part of a panel discussion or exchange knowledge through a fireside chat. On all of these platforms, we interacted with countless participants face-to-face, online, on blogs and from across the miles. What we learnt went into sharing, and what the others shared, we learnt too. We’ve indeed grown as an organisation.
Technology couldn’t possibly achieve anything on its own without the dedication and tenacity of a dream team, and strong support and partnership from the University. Over the year, we have received accolades and recognition from both local and foreign award bodies, and I’m proud to share all of these affirmations with you – your belief, commitment and steadfastness were key to every project’s success.
We said we’ll be a borderless university, and I am sure we are already getting there, with the best-in-class technology, solid synergy and shared vision among us in NUS.
With heartfelt appreciation, I present to you – our best “moments” in 2022.
Shui-Min
Ms Tan Shui-Min
Chief Information Technology Officer, NUS Information Technology
