ICT development lags behind despite significant progress

Resources need to be mobilized for ICT development

Core factor of digital economy

Hanoi’s deputy Nguyen Quoc Binh said at a recent national assembly session on socioeconomic development that Industry 4.0 is actually a digitalization process, a large transformation of the business model from service purchase and sales to service lease and provision. ICT should not be considered a separate sector but an essential one like human resources and finance that play key roles in adding value to a digital economy, Binh said.

Quoting Vietnam’s ICT White Book that provides statistics on the performance and development of the ICT sector, Binh said that in recent years, although it has achieved important developments, Vietnam’s ICT industry still lags far behind foreign countries and has not fully integrated with socioeconomic activities and government administration.

According to Binh, the communist party and the state have adopted the right policies on ICT but guidelines for implementing them are lacking or inadequate. For example, Prime Ministerial Decision 80/2014/QD-TTg on piloting lease of IT services in state agencies needs implementation guidelines, while Government Decree 102/2009/ND-CP on managing IT investment and application using state budgets is not compliant with modes of building digital assets and knowledge.

Keeping pace with digitalization

In 2016, to avoid lagging behind other countries in digitalization, the government instructed authorities at different levels to review strategies and action plans and propose plans and tasks for Industry 4.0 application. The government then established a national committee on e-government.

Binh said it is necessary to amend the mistakes stemming from inadequate awareness of ICT and outdated policy, standards and technology. For many years, computerization in Vietnam had been scattered and lacked an overall government-level management, leading to unconnected applications and networks and separate and low-quality databases, he said.

Existing separate national database projects must be merged urgently into an integrated system, a legal framework must be formulated to ensure the sharing of electronic nominal data and data privacy, and ICT application innovation must be promoted in state agencies towards applying trade and service policies.