The Deputy Prime Minister, Vu Duc Dam, recently signed a directive regarding e-government development towards digital governance and transformation nationwide. Despite encouraging results, major bottlenecks remain in the implementation of the work, specifically data sharing. The government has yet to ensure higher levels of cybersecurity and human resources and outline budgets for information technology applications and e-government building.
To address this, several relevant agencies have been tasked to prepare infrastructure and fulfil cyber security conditions to connect national databases. According to reports, they have been instructed to use data for the implementation of online public services by December. Ministries and agencies must work to improve the capacity and quality of services and expand connectivity, surveillance, and access control over data transmission networks by September. Agencies have also been asked to increase efforts for IPv6 adoption, work on information systems, and establish a communal digital technology network. The evaluation of digital government operations and digital transformation progress at agencies and organisations will be conducted annually in December.
The agencies are required to devise measures to encourage the use of digital signatures for administrative procedures. The government will organise training for at least 100,000 civil servants by December to meet personnel demands. Agencies have also been ordered to promote the development and use of ‘Made-in-Vietnam’ digital products and services, with the deadline for assessment set in December each year.
Earlier, the government launched the national data exchange platform (NDXP) to help connect, integrate, and share data among ministries, sectors, and localities nationwide. All 22 ministries, ministry-level agencies, and 63 provinces and cities are now connected with the NDXP. In the first quarter of 2022, more than 134.5 million transactions were made on the NDXP, surging 24-fold from a year earlier.
Under a plan by the National Committee on Digital Transformation, the goals for the digital government this year are to increase the rate of online public services to 80%, the rate of administrative procedures dossiers processed online to 50%, and the rate of digitisation of dossiers and results of administrative procedures to 100%. Also, the rate of reports made online by state administrative agencies to 50% as well as the rate of state agencies providing full open data by category to 50%.
Vietnam aims to have over 90% of its population use electronic health records for medical examinations, treatment, and health monitoring activities by the end of 2022. The Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) and localities will cooperate to build an electronic identification and authentication system based on the national population and citizen identification databases. About 15-20% of the population is expected to use e-identification applications by late this year, OpenGov Asia reported.
Recently, MIC issued electronic identification (eID) codes for its agencies and units. The ministry gets the eID Level 1 code and the advisory units (the office, inspectorate, and authorities of the ministry) are issued Level 2 codes. Level 3 is for its departments and their subordinate centres, and Level 4 is for the Institute of Post and Telecommunications Technology and its subordinate units.
