Along with the Resolution amending Resolution 98, the National Assembly has passed a series of laws related to the digital system, creating an important legal corridor to promote national digital data as well as relieve pressure on modernizing the administrative system.

However, the mechanism for connecting and sharing the "gold mine" of data remains limited. According to the Center, the city has massive digital resources with 101 databases totaling a capacity of 155 TB. The challenge is how to ensure data is no longer "fragmented" and effectively serves citizens and businesses.

At present, the use of HCMC’s shared data repository mainly stops at aggregation and has not effectively supported in-depth analysis or forecasting. Where do the root causes and technical barriers lie?

Currently, there is still no sufficiently reliable intermediary platform to promote data sharing and exploitation among agencies, organizations, and businesses. 

Data sets remain scattered, fragmented, and disconnected, creating difficulties in management, access control, and unified and transparent data exploitation.

In Vietnam, the policy on developing data and unlocking its value has been cited in many important documents, such as the Digital Data Law No60/2024/QH15; Project 06/CP on population data development, digital identification, and authentication; the Digital Government Development Strategy to 2030; along with policies promoting the digital economy and innovation.

Notably, the Data Law and Decree 169/2025/ND-CP have officially recognized data trading, exchange, and sharing as a conditional business activity, placed under the management and supervision of state agencies and authorized licensing bodies.

However, for these regulations and policies to truly take effect in practice, time is still needed, along with the joint participation of authorities, institutes, universities, citizens, and businesses in building a new data economy sector.

Given HCMC’s very large volume of administrative transactions, what solutions does the center have that are strong enough to handle “dirty data” and ensure the “live” nature of data, meaning real-time updates?

The city aims to achieve a high level of data governance maturity at level 4 and progressing toward 90 percent at level 5 in the 2028–2030 period. To realize this goal, a unified organizational model is needed, with a single focal point that has sufficient authority and capacity to coordinate all data-related activities.

Currently, the city’s Digital Transformation Center plays the role of ensuring the operation of digital infrastructure, platforms, and data. The formation, management, and exploitation of data are closely linked to data owners and to the effectiveness of applications and software systems.

Do the newly passed laws related to digital systems help remove obstacles for HCMC in requiring departments, agencies, and even the private sector to share data with the shared repository, putting an end to the situation of “data territorialization”?

The most common bottleneck today remains fragmented, inconsistent data that is difficult to connect and hard to verify as “trusted source data.” As the demand for governance, analysis, and forecasting continues to grow, establishing mechanisms for data listing, metadata description, data lineage, and clearly defined access rights has become an urgent practical requirement.

How has the city’s current infrastructure been prepared to ensure absolute security and prevent large-scale data breaches?

I would like to answer this question with a specific example from education management data. Currently, student data includes about 1.86 million records; teacher data more than 142,000 records; and school data about 441,000 records. These datasets are updated weekly into the city’s shared data repository. However, most data is still manually entered and digitized, rather than generated directly from operational processes.

Notably, the data has not been cleaned or reconciled with the National Population Database to determine subject identification and source data, nor has it been fully linked to personal or organizational identifiers. Therefore, the requirements of being “accurate, sufficient, clean, live, unified, and shared” have not yet been ensured.

Resolution 57 identifies data as a “primary means of production” and sets the requirement to form a data exchange. However, for data to be tradable, the key issue is valuation, while there is currently no mechanism for valuing data within the framework of public assets. Do the newly issued laws and the amendment of Resolution 98 help resolve this bottleneck?

HCMC has a great opportunity to move one step ahead in building a Data Exchange. With the advantages of a special-class city, large market scale, and strong digital capacity, HCMC has the opportunity to turn the Data Exchange into a foundational infrastructure for digital economic growth, while elevating its role as a regional hub.

Quoc Ngoc