Puchpong Nodthaisong, Secretary-General of the National Digital Economy and Society Commission (NDESC), emphasised the need for an open data platform to generate digital quality data. He made the statement while presiding over the opening of the Office of the National Digital Economy and Society Commission’s (NESDB) open data portal for the public sector as part of the data governance project to connect organisations to data platforms.
According to Puchpong, the open data platform can improve the utilisation of government data accounts. The platform ensures that critical national development issues are adequately analysed and decided upon. He emphasised that data is an asset in the country’s growth process. The unified data is beneficial for data analysis for decision-making in various disciplines, including scenario analysis for project planning, monitoring, and evaluation under the country’s economic and social thrust.
Government information and the registration of essential datasets in the Government Data Accounting System (GD Catalog) and the open government data system are essential for making information search efficient, quick, and easy to access. Moreover, it results in the interchange of information and the maximum utilisation of information, Puchpong remarked. NSC has also adopted data governance by integrating the Digital Economy and Society Development Fund’s data sets to connect the organisation to the public sector’s open data platform.
Thailand’s government has accelerated the development of a government information accounting system run by the National Statistical Office and established an open public information system run by the Digital Government Development Agency (Public Organisation) to integrate government data.
Aside from improving government digitisation, NDESC developed metrics to increase society’s digital knowledge and capabilities. For example, Ekapong Rimcharoen, Deputy Secretary-General of the National Digital Economy and Society Commission, presided over a meeting with Rattana Sacred Charoon, Director of the Division of Digital Driving for Society, to discuss the construction of a digital cognitive testing system.
Participants in this meeting included representatives from 39 Rajabhat Universities and the Thai Digital Industry Association, which is an agency working with the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board (NACC) to develop information literacy and digital understanding skills in Thailand (Media and Information Literacy and Digital Literacy: MILDL) to reach 2023 target of 70 points.
It is a mechanism for evaluating DL performance and can give certificates to individual test takers to develop the DL baseline system. Each participant will then provide feedback on constructing a digital cognitive assessment system.
To promote the development of the Digital Competency Framework and to broaden the results to the assessment of population competency, the ministry considered four aspects:
- Computer literacy.
- Digital/ICT skills.
- Proficiency in using digital tools to solve problems.
- Adaptive digital transformation.
This conference provided NSC with information on the level of demand for system development from Rajabhat University. The system must be expanded to facilitate population competency assessment. According to the Digital Competency Framework, the above four elements are currently only achieved in the Digital Literacy domain.
The digital cognitive testing system must be expedited. To satisfy the revised DE plan’s indicators by 2027, the Thai people must have a level of comprehension of at least 75%. The initiative helps the growth of the digital workforce and to be ready to step into new industries in the future, helps minimise budget spending on human resources development and education for the country, and establishes a framework.
By 2023, the National Standardisation Council (NSC) hoped to increase potential technology utilisation, improve digital risk awareness and security, and increase knowledge, skills, and human potential. The Thailand Digital Outlook Study 2023 Project will give statistics and guidelines for Thailand’s economy and society’s digital policies. Because of the digital economy, they want to boost digital economy measurement and gross product efficiency, which corresponds to the direction of economic structural changes.
To improve digital accessibility, they provide The Digital Volunteer Network Development Project (Volunteer Sor Sor.) Local people help promote and expand the project’s potential to generate revenue from new technological trends.