Lester Kum

About me

"I have spent 2/3 of my career with the Singapore Government. I spent the first few years was with then-IDA as a policy officer with some operations elements for the Singapore Network Information Center (SGNIC) dealing with .COM.SG, .SG etc domain names I left SGNIC and spent about 7 years in the private sector as a Chief Techical Officer (Technical Role) for an Australian company, and Business Development Director for a Malaysian Conglomerate dealing with a new global Top-Level Domain Name, .VIP. I re-joined then-IDA in 2015 and worked on policy and operations development for National Digital Identity, where the team explored the use cases for a digital ID for Singaporeans such as for voting, and how it can provisioned where it cannot be tempered with. Subsequently with the re-organisation of IDA into GovTech and iMDA, I went on to work on a smart nation product (Video Analytics Platform) for 2 years, which looked at building a common platform to host best-of-class video analytics algorithms for Whole-of-Government use such as footfall, suspicious objects and auto number plate recognition. After smart nation, I was seconded to Ministry of Education where I spent 2 years working on Student Learning Space (SLS) as the online learning portal providing equal access to quality curriculum-aligned resources in major subjects from primary to pre-university level. I subsequently left to join Maritime & Port Authority of Singapore and spent 6 years on the organizational transformation towards Agile and Product-centricity (with COVID as the infraction point), and worked on COVID ops. I restructured the IT teams into agile product teams with design, development, cloud and security skillsets, where officers focused on solving specific problems. I also started the chapter on AI and data engineering where MPA became one of the first agencies to leverage on AI to automate some of it manual workloads where physical officers had to be deployed to manually verify documents. I am currently deployed to Building and Construction Authority as its Deputy Program Director by GovTech, and I oversee CORENET X as a product. The current system is costing the industry and government $35million and 5.3million annually in operating inefficiencies, and CORENET X provides a solution by providing a single platform for Qualified Professionals and the various agencies to work together upfront instead of providing disperate submissions across the value chain. As part of the project, the team is developing an Automated Model Checker to help industry and government automatically check the compliance of 3D building plans against ~6000 regulatory rules such as fire safety, architecture etc. This is the first of its kind and we are also exploring the use of AI to further supplement the development and scale it as more regulatory rules are added due to policy."

I'm interested in Digital and Technology, Education and Career and Sports and Physical Well-being.

I've worked in Built Environment, Energy and Power, Infocomm Technology, Public Service and Sea Transport.

Education

GCE O-Level

Polytechnic Diploma

Bachelor's Degree