# Singapore's infocomm regulator assessed stand-alone applications and systems support engineer roles as high-impact, judging their tasks would be absorbed into development and DevOps teams

Page: https://flyvolo.ai/en/changes/ev-20221001-it-support-specialist-2
Date: 2022-10-01 · Stage: Forecast
Can this record move a task judgement? no
Occupation: https://flyvolo.ai/en/careers/it-support-specialist

## Scope

A commissioned sector study, not a measurement, and the mechanism it names is the part worth keeping. Only one of its three routes is a machine doing the work: AI automating help desk answers and ticket routing. The other two are reorganisation — under Agile and CI/CD the development function takes over maintaining software and overseeing transition and testing, and under SaaS or PaaS the service provider takes over maintaining and updating the software, 'reducing the manpower needed for the in-house capability'. The report's own sentence is that there will be a decreasing need for stand-alone roles because the tasks will be 'subsumed under the Applications Development or DevOps team's job tasks' (for applications support; for systems support, 'under the DevOps team's job tasks'). Work moving to a different team is not the same event as work being automated, and a retelling flattens exactly that difference. Dated October 2022 on analysis dated December 2020, so written before generative AI reached the public — which matters because the help-desk automation it describes is ticket routing and canned answers, not a chat model. Singapore's infocomm workforce only; stakeholder interviews, not employment data.

## Source

- IMDA / Workforce Singapore — Impact Study on the Information & Communications Workforce in Singapore (full report, PDF) — https://www.swda.gov.sg/api/assets/d65e963c-df80-4768-b5b4-4bb214307a22/imda-impact-study-master-full-vf6.pdf (primary source)

## What this means

The clearest thing in this record is not that a machine took the work. It is that the work was expected to move to a different team. The agency's own sentence is that stand-alone support engineer roles would be needed less because the tasks would be subsumed under the Applications Development or DevOps team's tasks — and separately, that a SaaS or PaaS provider would take over maintaining and updating the software. Only one of its three routes is automation; the other two are a reorganisation and a purchasing decision.

## What it does not show yet

It counts nobody and it changes no judgement here. It is an expectation published in 2022 on analysis from 2020, before generative AI reached the public — so the help-desk automation it describes is ticket routing and prepared answers, not the chat models a reader today would have in mind. It covers Singapore, and it says nothing about whether the people in those roles moved, were retrained, or left.

## How to verify it yourself

Look at where your own tickets end up. If the ones that used to come to you are now closed by whoever built the system, or by the vendor whose platform you moved onto, the change described here has already happened in your organisation and it did not arrive as a tool. Ask who owns the service level agreement today, and who owned it three years ago.


More: https://flyvolo.ai/llms.txt