Việt Nam News reported that Deputy Prime Minister Vũ Đức Đam called upon ministries to speed up the move to e-government, so that all government services can be offered online to the public.
Việt Nam’s Government issued a resolution in October 2015 aiming to have a full suite of e-public services for all central State agencies and ministries. Users should be able to access online forms and submit their completed forms and other documents to State agencies online for processing. The objective is to reduce the time and cost of completing administrative procedures.
The news report states that Vietnam had 130,000 administrative procedures as of the current month, according to a report by the Vietnam Association for Information Processing. But the number would be halved if they were standardised in terms of name, process, file and forms and redundancies eliminated.
The Deputy Prime Minister pointed out in his speech at a conference on e-government that VietNam’s ranking in the bi-annual United Nations E-government development index (EGDI) had improved by ten places compared to 2014 to 89th among 193 193 United Nations Member States.Vietnam’s online public services were ranked at 74, communication infrastructure in 110th place, and human resources in 127th in the 2016 survey. Vietnam was among the ten countries which improved their e-government performance and made the leap from middle-EGDI
to high-EGDI values.
However, there is still some way to go. The Deputy Prime Minister said that certain ministries and agencies failed to collect or update data that the UN uses to calculate the e-government index, giving examples of the the Ministry of Education and Training (absence of statistics about expected years of schooling of children and average years of schooling of adults over 15 years old, which are considered in the human resource index) and the Ministry of Information and Communications (absence of updated statistics on number of Internet users, number of landline telephone subscribers per 100 people, mobile phone subscribers per 100 people or the wireless gateway rate.)
Mr. Đam went on to say that a high EGDI ranking could help attract investors and help the country in negotiations for international trade pacts. He exhorted ministries to analyse categories and criteria in the e-government rating index and assume responsibility for those that are relevant to their work. Ministries would need to review their databases and means of information delivery. The approach would be to run pilot programmes and expand subsequently.
To monitor the performance of ministries and the shift to e-government, the Minister of Information and Communications, Trương Minh Tuấn, said that the ministry would issue criteria to assess the application of information technology in State offices.
Read the report on Việt Nam News (published in Hanoi by the Vietnam News Agency, the news service of the government of Vietnam) here.
Photo credit: Nam-ho Park/ licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license