Singapore Government Press Release

Media Division, Ministry of Information and The Arts,

36th Storey, PSA Building, 460 Alexandra Road, Singapore 119963.

Tel: 3757794/5

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SPEECH BY MR WONG KAN SENG, MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS, AT THE HOME TEAM LAUNCHING WORKSHOP

ON 24 FEB 1997 AT 9 AM AT THE SUNTEC CITY AUDITORIUM

Officers of the MHA Group, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning

The MHA Group And The "Best Home" Vision

Our national vision is to make Singapore Our Best Home. In this vision, we see a society that is vibrant and confident in every sphere of life. A country that is celebrated by its citizens as among the best in the world. A country that offers her people a level of security and safety that is unrivalled anywhere else. A society where people have a strong sense of service and fulfilment in serving the community; where there is harmony and unity among people of many races, religions and cultures.

What is MHA's role in achieving this vision? The MHA Group is the lead agency ensuring a safe and secure home for Singapore. I want to position the MHA Group to deliver on this vision. When Parliament opens in May, the Government will set out the key programmes for its next term. I shall announce programmes and policies by the Ministry of Home Affairs that will help to realise the Best Home vision for Singapore.

The Home Team -- The Way Forward For The MHA Group

Since 1995, you have heard on television the jingle: "The Home Team, Here To Make It Right". Yet, we have waited until today to officially launch the Home Team concept. This is because the Home Team concept is more than an advertising slogan. The Home Team requires big changes in MHA departments. It is a new way of seeing our work. How we think. How we operate. How we manage. And how we learn. It is team work, but it is also very much more. First, it means a shared Vision for the whole MHA Group. Second, it means thinking as a Group about how to achieve this shared Vision. Third, it means learning how to make the changes that this new way demands of us. We worked very hard through '95 and '96 to prepare and make these changes.
The work of our eight departments, including Ministry HQ, is closely interlinked. We have traditionally cooperated and coordinated as separate departments. Each department is highly competent. But each has its mindset and its interests. These are deeply rooted, conditioned by history. It has worked well. But well enough is not good enough for the new performance demands of the future. This future is not a few steps away. It is already here. The Vision that we share shows the way ahead to seize this future. The Home Team, building on the strengths of our departments, is the instrument to seize this future.

Results Of The Home Team Concept

Let me give you some concrete results. The first example actually marked the birth of the Home Team concept. The MHA Group struggled to design a new state-of-the-art command, control and communications system. The project began in the Police. Civil Defence also wanted a C3 system. It was a struggle for the Police, even more so for Civil Defence. As the project developed, it became clear that we could not reap the real benefits unless the technology went further than just helping the Police or Civil Defence work well by itself. The C3 project now involves almost all our departments. Next, we learned that we could further maximise the benefits of the technology only if we revamped our operations across the departments. A multi-department, multi-discipline team is now rewriting our operating approaches and doctrines. If the MHA Group does not work seamlessly together and in fundamentally different ways, we will not be able to master new technology, and maximise the use of such a key resource.
The second example shows how the Home Team concept works in our operations. Police and civil defence units working separately on their own missions may actually get into each others' way. The commanders of the Jurong Police Division and the 4th Civil Defence Division are exposing their officers to each others' work. These two Divisions are going beyond coordination, to develop and test procedures for joint operations. They have forged a shared mission.
The third example goes to a higher level. The concept of the Home Team guided the planning and execution of Operation Oriole -- a highly successful mission to return the Vietnamese Boat People. 6 of the MHA Group's departments, namely ISD, Ministry HQ, Prisons, Immigration, SCDF and SPF linked their operations seamlessly to deliver the result.
The fourth example shows how the Home Team concept has led to Group-wide efforts to produce superior results. This is in the radical transformation of the CNB. CNB had focused on intelligence and enforcement. I decided that we needed a new integrated strategy combining more preventive education, more effective rehabilitation, greater community involvement as well as tougher enforcement measures and penalties for hardcore addicts. CNB had to broaden its scope internally to emphasize preventive education. Externally, it had to work with partners both in and outside the Home Team. As a result of encouragement from Ministry HQ, CNB embarked on developing its information technology infrastructure. Through MHQ's support, CNB's staff was doubled. The CNB was an early beneficiary of MHA's Home Team strategy.

The MHA Group Vision

Through these and other examples, officers across the MHA Group have begun to realise the power of the Home Team concept. Last year, hundreds of officers across the Home Team worked through what the concept really means in practice. In this work, we have achieved 2 things.
First, there is now a broad-based consensus that the Home Team is a powerful idea whose time has come. The 8 departments of the MHA Group, namely:

the Central Narcotics Bureau,

Internal Security Department,

National Registration Department,

Prisons Department,

Singapore Civil Defence Force,

Singapore Immigration,

Singapore Police Force and

Ministry Headquarters.

share a common mission and corporate philosophy. We are clear that the issues that will impact the safety, security and social cohesion of our people as we meet the future cannot be effectively tackled by keeping the status quo.

Second, we have crystallised a share vision of who we are, what we want to be and how we want to go about achieving our Mission. Our vision is that we want to be world-class in serving our country, by delivering a safe and secure home for our people. This means world-class standards in professionalism, in operational excellence, and in service quality. "World-class" is not a woolly notion. We will benchmark our professional capabilities, our operations, and our services against similar agencies elsewhere. World-class means benchmarking ourselves against the no. 1, no. 2, no. 3 in the world in each area of work. World-class definitely means no. 1 in Asia. Be it crime rates, drug rehabilitation success rates, or processing times for permits and licenses, we want to do these better than anyone else in Asia. We can reach world-class standards, and we are prepared to be measured publicly against them. Since other countries do not stand still, we can only be world-class by constantly striving to improve our performance.
But what makes the vision of the MHA Group outstanding is the way by which the Vision was created. The Vision was not decreed by top management. It was put together after a year of dialogue, debate, and soul-searching among the people of the MHA Group. The creation of the Vision and Credo reflects the aspirations, ideals and hopes of the people who serve in the MHA Group today. Ours is a shared vision belonging to the people of the MHA Group. This process helps us to become an organisation that is willing to learn and improve through the contributions of our people. A vision developed through such a process is powerful because it is owned by the officers. It energises the individual to live the vision every day. During our discussions, one of our officers told me a story of a toilet attendant working with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), who proudly told a visiting consultant that he helped to put men on the moon by keeping the toilets at NASA clean. The toilet attendant explained that by providing a clean environment for the engineers who used the toilet, they were able to think more clearly and thus to make less mistakes. This is his part in sending men to the moon. I hope that, likewise, our Group vision will help each officer to feel that whatever his rank and his job, whichever department he belongs to, he is joined to a bigger and noble enterprise.

The Directions of Change
The vision for the MHA Group calls for the development of a dynamic, progressive, people-centred organisation that our officers are proud to serve in. We have to overhaul our management and organisational systems. We are working towards achieving this through three key areas.
First, we are updating our physical infrastructure and hardware. You will have noticed that MHA has been ground-breaking many new buildings. Second, we are retooling the Home Team for the Information Age. Information technology is the responsibility of all officers, not just the computer experts. MHQ set up a new Technology Division last year to spearhead our technology efforts.
Third, we recognise that our traditional administrative approach is simply too slow. We are re-engineering work processes for faster and better results. Fourth, and most important of all, we are modernising our people management. Our operational plans, our IT systems, our modern buildings - ultimately depend on our people, their skills, motivation and commitment to our mission. The MHA Group must have a people management system that nurtures, supports and encourages our people to work towards our shared vision. We are in the midst of a substantial revamp of our approach to training and manpower development. This will include the inculcation of core values to anchor us in the flux of change. We are making a major push in the area of organisational learning, effective teaming, and empowerment. We are redesigning our jobs to give officers challenge and reward, and to let them see clearly their part in achieving our vision.
All these changes point in the same direction: they are all part of a systematic effort by the MHA Group to change through the Home Team way. If I may sum up our work in a sentence, we are strategically repositioning the MHA Group to proactively meet the future. If I may sum up our goal, we want to be world-class in what we do so as to achieve Our Best Home.

A Call To Realise The MHA Group Vision

This is a massive undertaking. I am pleased that we have enjoyed significant initial successes. This tells us that the vision is within our reach. But achieving it will require each and every one of us to be committed to making it work. It will require us to approach the task with conviction, but also with humility, honesty and a willingness to learn and improve. I hope that the 600 officers here today will help bring the Vision and ideas presented in the Workshop to the entire Home Team. To help you do this, the MHA Group will invest in a sustained internal corporate communications programme to reach out to every officer. This workshop is the first step. Today, I issue a challenge to you to work with me to achieve our goal of being a world-class Home Team by the turn of the century.
As with all tough challenges, pioneers help show the way ahead. Today, we recognise some of our "pathfinders" with the inaugural Home Team Achievement Awards. I want to congratulate not only the winners but also all the nominees. The large number of nominations show that the organisation is energised and we are making good progress.

Conclusion

People are at the heart of the MHA Group. Each of us has something to bring to the Home Team, and also something to learn from working in a winning team. None of us is too junior, or too senior, to have no part in building the Home Team. The Home Team is a completely different way of thinking, operating, managing and learning for the MHA Group. It is about thinking, learning and working together for a shared Vision, to create and master our future.
I hope that each of you will be open to this change and will commit yourself to the new and exciting journey that lies ahead. I am now very pleased to launch the Home Team officially and to declare open the Home Team Launching Workshop.

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