Minister Mai Tien Dung: Paperless office will help solve petty corruption!

Vietnam has officially launched the National Document Interconnection Axis, which is considered the premise of a data integration platform serving e-Government, towards a digital Government. Minister Mai Tien Dung discussed the story of paperless state agencies, towards an e-Government, digitalization in the future.

Minister, Head of the Government Office Mai Tien Dung

- According to the Minister's vision, what would a paperless Government be like?

In fact, a modern, reformed administration in the direction of a creative, decisive and effective Government must aim to digitize documents and papers. Accordingly, all human resources and work will be rearranged, leading to savings and reductions.

Besides, the awareness and responsibility of civil servants will be enhanced. At this time, they will remind themselves that when doing anything, there are people watching and supervising. If they do not do well, they will immediately be reflected and evaluated.

We need to change our working mindset, instead of covering up, pulling and shoving for benefits, which as General Secretary and President Nguyen Phu Trong often says is petty corruption, we must completely eliminate it. Making the Government paperless and electronic will solve the problem.

- That said, many civil servants and public employees still have the habit of working on paper, but on the other hand, they hesitate to use technology for fear of being controlled and monitored?

This is true. As I said, we need to change our thinking and our way of doing things. In the past, work could be kept secret, not public, and we could monopolize it as much as we wanted because only the officials and civil servants knew. This led to businesses and people being made difficult when they needed to do administrative procedures and paperwork.

Now, when an electronic file is created, it will limit contact between citizens and public servants. Documents are submitted, signed, numbered and sent on time, not a single second is wasted.

The leader of Quang Ninh province told the story of a family where the wife prepared an envelope of money for her husband before he went to do administrative procedures. But when he got there, he did not know who to give the money to because he could not meet any officials. That is what we all want: the people benefit and they have faith in a transparent Government.

- It can be understood that the National Document Interconnection Axis is just a first step, further is the goal of e-Government and digitalization. However, there is an issue pointed out by experts: database interconnection. How can ministries, departments, branches, and offices share data with each other?

This is the bottleneck. We need to have an e-Government architecture framework, a common design for all software companies and stick to it.

Currently, in a province, there is a situation where each department, branch, and unit has its own separate software that cannot be connected to each other. This will be overcome. In the future, on the basis of standardization, software development enterprises must comply with this regulation. Thus, information sharing will be based on a common, overall framework. This also aims to avoid scattered, ineffective investment.

Another issue that needs attention is absolute information security. All products and services are evaluated by foreign organizations and advisory boards, not just the Ministry of Information and Communications.

- So how do we make people believe in e-Government?

To gain people's trust, the Prime Minister has directed: Services that are needed by people and businesses must be done first. That means they must be convenient in operation, connection, easy to do, low cost... Those procedures must be what we expect: fast, cutting down on hassle and negativity. That is the Prime Minister's wish.

But this cannot be done in a moment, it is a process. Even the infrastructure and database we do not have yet, or what we have is not complete, not screened and standardized. We have to do it step by step but we have to be bold, learn from experience and make adjustments as we go. If we are too perfectionist, we cannot do it. We are a latecomer, if we do not move forward, do not keep up with the pace, we will fall behind.

I am very happy to see that our businesses and human resources are good and highly appreciated. However, we need to bring them together, because if they are good individually, but if three of them sit together, they will "argue". The Prime Minister has also said that he wants to connect domestic and foreign businesses, large and small businesses to join hands in making e-Government.

Thank you, Minister!