National Digital Transformation Good Strategy for Targeted Implementation

The The Government of Vietnam has set the dual goals of developing a digital government, digital economy, and digital society and establishing globally competitive Vietnamese digital firms to achieve its aspirations for a strong and prosperous Vietnam and its wealthy and happy people.

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh delivers a keynote address at the National Digital Transformation event 

This statement was delivered by Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh on National Digital Transformation Day, October 10, 2023, with the theme “Mining digital data to create values”. The day is celebrated annually to accelerate national digital transformation and effectively implement the National Digital Transformation Program to 2025, with a vision to 2030.

Important initial outcomes

Following the Prime Minister’s decision to make 2023 the Year of National Digital Data, Vietnam has made significant progress in national digital transformation, especially in creating and utilizing digital data. The country has achieved positive results in data sharing and connection, data exploitation to serve people and businesses, digital data infrastructure development, and data digitization.

The national data sharing and integration platform is effectively operated and has enhanced its service capacity with 1.6 million daily transactions.

The national population database has received nearly 1.2 billion requests for information lookup and verification. The national insurance database has verified information on 91 million people with the national population database.

The electronic civil status database has over 45 million birth registration data, including over 9.2 million children with personal identification numbers.

The national database on civil servants and public employees has been connected and synchronized with 100% of ministries, branches, and localities and has synchronized over 2.1 million data of civil servants and public employees (reaching a rate of 95%).

The information system of the Government and the Prime Minister has connected data with 80 ministries, branches, localities, and State-owned corporations and has shared daily and monthly testing data of ministries and central agencies with 15 localities for administration work.

The top digital firms in Vietnam such as VNPT, FPT, and Viettel have demonstrated their pioneering leadership in deploying national and specialized databases and building digital platforms for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), finance, payments, and services, which has helped boost Vietnam’s digital economic growth.

According to Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung, 2023 is the fourth year of implementing the national digital transformation program. He said that digital transformation is truly universal and inclusive. The country has nearly 100,000 community digital teams that guide people in digital transformation in all villages.

He also said that to grow faster and higher, Vietnam needs a new space, new productive forces, new production resources, new production factors, and new motive forces. The new space is the digital economy. The new productive force is digital technology. The new production resource is digital human resources. The new production factor is digital data. The new motive force is digital innovation.

The overview of National Digital Transformation Day 2023 

Universal, inclusive digital transformation but quality prioritized

The Government of Vietnam has achieved some initial results in national digital transformation, but it also faces many difficulties, obstacles, and challenges such as data connection and sharing, data digitization, technical standards and regulations on digital data, digital data infrastructure, information security, network security, and human resources.

The Prime Minister stated that to effectively carry out national digital transformation, Vietnam needs to have a good strategy and targeted implementation and create changes in social management, operation, and administration. The Prime Minister also emphasized that people and businesses are the heart, the actors, the goals, the driving forces, and the resources of digital transformation. Digital transformation must enable people and businesses to benefit from public services and social utilities that are more convenient, faster, and more effective, and they themselves will create resources for development.

The Prime Minister highlighted four main viewpoints in digital transformation, including digital data creation and mining.

First, strategic vision and innovation from thinking, perception, and actions must be consistent with practical conditions.

Second, national digital transformation must be implemented comprehensively but quality must be prioritized over quantity. Four main priorities must be focused on: Developing digital data; Developing online public services that are linked to people and businesses and have a large audience coverage; Developing digital platforms; and Ensuring network security, information security, and human security.

 Third, the national database is a new resource and an important foundation for national digital transformation. Therefore, it must be highly connected and shared among central and local agencies and between public and private sectors.

Fourth, it is important to foster initiatives and innovations; mobilize all resources and engage all levels and sectors of authority, people, and the business community; and utilize all resources to strongly develop digital infrastructure and digital platforms to facilitate people and businesses to access many digital services and digital utilities.

Based on these key viewpoints, the Prime Minister requested central agencies and localities to perfect mechanisms and policies for stable and sustainable development of digital infrastructure, digital platforms, and digital human resources to speed up data digitization. Accelerating data creation by building, developing, connecting, sharing, and mining national and specialized databases is an important factor in digital transformation utilized for socioeconomic development and value generation.

In particular, there is a need for cooperation in clearing bottlenecks in carrying out Project 06. The Ministry of Public Security has worked with the Ministry of Information and Communications, the Ministry of Construction, and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment to research and propose solutions for adding national digital address information to the national population database; integrating electronic identification accounts with the national real estate exchange system and national land database system; declaring digital addresses of individuals and organizations on VNeID to ensure compliance with current regulations; and reporting on implementation results to the Prime Minister before November 30, 2023.

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh asked ministries, central branches, and localities to increase investment in developing, upgrading, and modernizing digital infrastructure, especially shared infrastructure, payment infrastructure, and credit information infrastructure. He also stressed the need to ensure computing capacity, transmission, stability, reliability, and safety in building digital database systems; expand digitization of administrative records and results; and support businesses to adapt their production and business activities to the digital environment to ensure harmony of interests among the State, people, and businesses.

Moreover, he emphasized the need to strengthen communication on the benefits and impacts of digital transformation, helping state agencies, people, and businesses to clearly understand the advantages and outcomes of digital transformation, actively participate in digital transformation, and enjoy its benefits.

He expressed his belief that national digital transformation and digital data development will comprehensively and effectively enhance socioeconomic development, social management, digital economy, and digital society and importantly help achieve socioeconomic development goals and tasks in 2023 and the 5-year plan from 2021 to 2025 to bring a prosperous and happy life to the people.

By Quynh Chi, Vietnam Business Forum