The Ho Chi Minh City municipal Department of Information and Communications aims to fully digitise public services by linking up with the National Public Service Portal in 2023, with a goal of 100% online availability.
The city will also focus on accelerating digital transformation and smart city development, the department said. It strives to fully connect with the Ministry of Public Security’s identity authentication and population database systems, as well as the national databases of other ministries and sectors.
The city will work to deploy digital citizenship and adopt unified mobile applications so that people and businesses can use public services anywhere and anytime. The Department also aims to operate five digital platforms to serve management work. It plans to operationalise six specialised information systems of departments and sectors, including electronic health records of the Health Department and land use information of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment.
In November 2022, the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee launched an information system to handle administrative procedures. This system was developed by combining the online public service portal and the electronic single-window system. The VNPT-built system is capable of handling 17 million dossiers each year.
As OpenGov Asia reported, people and enterprise-centred systems are connected with the National Public Service Portal, the electronic authentication, identification systems, and information systems and databases of ministries and central agencies. This has created favourable conditions for individuals and organisations to handle administrative procedures in a swift and accurate manner.
The authorities in Ho Chi Minh City view administrative reforms as a priority and measure the success of these reforms based on the satisfaction of citizens and the growth of businesses, the Chairman of the city’s People’s Committee noted.
Around 13 million people in the city, including the local population of almost ten million and people from other localities, require administrative procedures to be processed. It will be hard for civil servants to complete handling papers on schedule if they use traditional methods. Therefore, applying an information system for handling administrative procedures is an urgent need, the Chairman explained.
The city has also announced plans to coordinate with a global financial institution to develop a data management strategy, aiming to better cultivate data for government operations. The strategy identified a vision, specific goals, priority areas, and plans for the implementation of data and digitisation projects to improve the city’s data-driven governance.
Ho Chi Minh wants its digital economy to account for 25% of the southern hub’s gross regional domestic product (GRDP) by 2025. Accordingly, the local government will focus on raising public awareness of digital transformation, organising the implementation of digital transformation tasks, and completing the digital government. Authorities will work to integrate and effectively exploit data to aid post-COVID-19 socio-economic recovery and development and support modern-oriented governance.
Specific action programmes will be mapped out and implemented, while the application of information technology will be accelerated across fields. The local government will also work to ensure information security and safety when building the digital government, economy, and society. The government said it would strongly invest in human resources development, focusing on training and fostering cadres, civil servants, and public employees.