The Horizon Scanning Centre (HSC) is located within NSCC and serves as the operational nerve centre of the RAHS network connecting various Government agencies. Its key role is to support the community of agencies in collaboration within RAHS, to identify and detect early indicators of strategic shocks that could have a devastating impact on Singapore.

The Centre organizes case studies to coordinate the workflows and processes of the agencies, synergizing their horizon scanning efforts and facilitating information exchange as well as multiple perspectives on issues faced. To promote a networked government for the wider security of Singapore, the HSC relies on the RAHS system as an enabler to drive agency collaboration.

The HSC also analyses open source information from a variety of domain-specific areas to detect cross-silo threats in the 2-5 year time horizon, and publishes the output in the form of information services such as the Horizon Scanning News and Vanguard.

The HSC manages the RAHS portal which is a one stop destination for agencies to access a range of RAHS products such as weak signal alerts, dashboards, models, information libraries and general horizon scanning news. The HSC leads in the identification and monitoring of low probability-high impact events or wildcards, as part of the strategic planning process, and in maintaining a Trends Database.

>> Case Studies

HSC conducts case studies with the agency domain experts, on a range of topics from climate change, pandemic surveillance to maritime security and energy security.

During the case study engagements, the RAHS system would be used to generate models in the form of System Maps, Scenarios, and Ranking, as well as to promote perspective sharing through Indexing and Explorer Visualizations. To close the analytical loop, monitoring workflows are established between HSC and the agencies to detect new trends or issues of interest that would update the RAHS analytical outputs and inform the strategic planning process.

>> Information Libraries

To support the monitoring process in RAHS, the HSC has created information libraries with contributions from the agencies. The libraries are oriented around the key domains that support HSC’s case study engagements, and encourage a culture of information-sharing within the RAHS community.