At the seminar (Photo: SGGP)
Mr. Mai made the statement at a seminar on the improvement of the southern metropolis’s digital transformation capacity with the theme "Data-based decision making: The key to digital transformation and recovery and socio-economic development" held by the municipal People's Committee on December 16 with the attendance of Carolyn Turk, new World Bank Country Director in Vietnam, economic experts and representatives from agencies.
Speaking at the opening of the workshop, Chairman Mai said that in the complicated situation of the Covid-19 epidemic, the city’s three problems have arisen. They are city administration in the new situation, building a database system and linking databases in the operation and operation of the city administration, political innovation, finding new drivers for future city growth.
At the conference, Ms. Carolyn Turk said that the Covid-19 epidemic has become an impetus for fast-growing digital transformation globally. Applications, virtual assistants, AI programs all have been applied, helping the management agency handle faster in epidemic prevention and control.
People are also turning to digital platforms rapidly, and online public policies are promoted. This is the time when the city determines its digital transformation strategy for socio-economic recovery and development.
Senior Public Governance expert in World Bank in Vietnam Tran Thi Lan Huong commented that Vietnam is currently in the "middle of the road" in the international ranking of the digital economy.
Despite having better governance for e-government reform - digital transformation in recent years, Vietnam is still slow in implementing digital transformation because most state agencies in Vietnam has not replaced paper-based processing of public services by the computerized process.
Chairman Phan Van Mai
Moreover, the country still lacks clear and appropriate financial mechanisms for investment in digital government.
However, Ho Chi Minh City jumped from the seventh position to fifth place among 63 provinces and centrally-run cities in the Vietnam ICT Readiness Index for Application and Development Index (Vietnam ICT Index) in 2021 thanks to improvements in technical infrastructure, human infrastructure and IT application.
Regarding the plan to develop a shared data warehouse for Ho Chi Minh City's digital transformation in 2022, Deputy Director of the Department of Information and Communications Vo Thi Trung Trinh said from 2017, the city has put into use an integrated data platform fot the first phase including structured data integration platform; integrate some cadastral data, business, and tax.
By 2019, the data integration platform’s second phase will be put into use and the DIP-HCM feature and the unstructured data storage platform were added as well as some new data is integrated.
By 2020, the implementation of a shared data warehouse and an integrated inter-connected platform has gained certain achievements such as the connection of 41 units and 222 shared services; subsequently, the city can handle one million requests a day.
Today's digital transformation is not only a global technology trend but also has a profound impact on all fields of the economy - society. Ho Chi Minh City has set a target that the rate of online public services will reach 50 percent or more by 2025. Furthermore, at least 90 percent of residents and businesses are satisfied while dealing with administrative procedures.
Chairman Mai shakes hands with Ms. Carolyn Turk
In addition, the personal information of city dwellers and businesses is digitized and stored in the city's data center to become a data source - a resource for socio-economic development.
At the workshop, Vice Chairman of Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee Duong Anh Duc thanked the support of the World Bank and experts emphasizing that the role of data in digital transformation has been seen clearly; therefore, city authorities will turn data that can be exploited to be a digital resource for digital transformation.
To do so, it is necessary to continue to promote the construction of a source with a fully shared database, a mechanism for sharing and accepting each others’ data for efficient data exploitation.
In the coming time, the municipal Department of Information and Communications will complete the city's general database system with more attention to having an open data source to turn data into a resource for the digital transformation of the city, said Vice Chairman Duc.
