Ministries asked to speed up online public service delivery

Deputy PM Vu Duc Dam urged ministries and agencies on January 18 to accelerate the delivery of online public services, first focusing on those that help to reduce budget expenditure.

Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam (centre)

He noted that Vietnam should learn from countries with a high availability of online public services, such as France and Japan.

The deputy PM said that Vietnam’s e-government ranking could further improve if ministries and agencies increase the number of public services provided on the web.

According to the 2016 UN E-Government Survey, Vietnam ranked 89 among 193 countries overall, but ranked 74 on the scope and quality of online services, 110 on telecommunications infrastructure and 127 on human capacity.

The UN report shows there are more and more countries providing online public services through a single portal.

New technologies such as big data and the internet of things are becoming effective tools in enhancing the effectiveness of public services while social media has played a greater role in communication between the people and the government.

Representatives of ministries and agencies said much of the data used by the UN to calculate Vietnam’s ranking had not been updated or even provided, such as the expected number of years of schooling and average number of years of schooling, which were not provided by the Ministry of Education and Training.

Similarly, actual data on such indicators as the number of internet users, the number of fixed telephone lines, the number of mobile subscribers, the number of wireless broadband subscriptions and the number of fixed broadband subscriptions were all higher than suggested in the data used by the UN survey.

Deputy PM Dam said those rankings affected the competitiveness of the nation and its appeal to foreign investors.

Therefore he asked the Ministry of Education and Training to quickly provide the missing information and asked the Ministry of Information and Communications to work to improve e-government indicators.

(Source: NDO)