Symposium to boost E-government development

The 2011 Vietnam E-Government Symposium on “E-Government and Administrative Reforms” was held in Ho Chi Minh City on July 14. The seminar was jointly held by the National Steering Committee on Information and Communications Technologies, the Ministry of Information and Communications, the HCM City People’s Committee, and the IDG Vietnam.

Six reports and four in-depth discussions at the event focused on evaluating the application of information technology in developing an E-government as well as directions for the future.

According to a United Nation report, Vietnam ranked 90th in the world and sixth in ASEAN in terms of IT application.

At present, 70 percent of ministries and agencies own a website while 80 percent of administrative agencies have their own information portals. 60 percent of provincial agencies have access to Local Area Network (LAN) and 90 percent of them have access to the Internet.

Over the past three years, the E-government has helped Vietnam save thousands of billion VND and leaders have been fully aware of the E-government.

However, the administrative formalities are still very complicated and the IT has not yet proved effective in many localities. So Vietnam should promote the implementation of programmes to improve the effectiveness of E-government and the administrative reforms, especially a project to make Vietnam a strong IT country and a national program on the application of information technology to operations of state agencies during 2011-2015.

On the sideline of the symposium, there was a Vietnam Consumer Digital World Expo with more than 300 domestic and international leading multinational groups and companies.

talkvietnam.com