Open Government Products (OGP), a part of GovTech, is using MongoDB for its product FormSG - a digital form builder used by the Singapore government and public healthcare institutions to securely collect data from residents and businesses.
FormSG allows integration with government systems, enabling it to support authentication using SingPass.
OGP is an in-house team of engineers, designers, and product managers, with GovTech who are responsible for building technologies for the public good.
The team has integrated FormSG with the cloud infrastructure provided by AWS and runs on MongoDB's developer data platform MongoDB Atlas.
MongoDB is the central data store of FormSG.
OGP’s product manager, Amit Samdarshi told iTnews Asia that the form manager powered by MongoDB on AWS enables public officers to create digital government forms in minutes, eliminating the use of paper forms.
Samdarshi said the team is using MongoDB since the start of the project.
FormSG was forked from another open-source form builder service known as Tellform, which was already using MongoDB, he added.
Challenges
Government agencies in Singapore used to “spend” a substantial amount of time and effort to “transcribe” physical paper forms as well as a huge volume of different types of forms across all government departments, said Samdarshi.
There were “escalating concerns” about data privacy and protection.
To that end, “OGP chose MongoDB as a secure and encrypted database solution. Since then, the team has continued using MongoDB Atlas without any noticeable issues,” Samdarshi added.
With MongoDB Atlas in place, FormSG helps “public officers collect data” for various purposes, including travel and health declarations by visitors to the country, applications for Covid-19 swab tests, financial assistance applications and distribution (collection of citizens’ bank details), and, during the pandemic, over 100,000 daily temperature declarations by public officers and students nationwide.
Further, the form “collects feedback” from public officers on remote work, and for mandatory primary school registration in Singapore.
Offering better services
Since its launch in 2017, over 120,000 public officers from 155 agencies have benefitted from FormSG, creating over 500,000 digital forms – from small surveys to large applications integrated with some agencies’ back-end systems, Samdarshi said.
To date, FormSG has collected 180 million forms submitted by members of the public.
With MongoDB Atlas as its central data store, FormSG is now widely used as a feature-rich government service that offers quick form creation, and pre-built integration with Singpass, Corppass, sgID, and MyInfo, said Samdarshi.
Further, it provides end-to-end encryption, the ability to scale, and automatic acknowledgement of emails, he added.
