VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) is considering promulgating the standards for software association, requesting software developers to cooperate to make the plan on exchanging e-documents among state agencies realistic.

MIC has set up a plan to have 60 percent of documents and materials of state agencies to be exchanged via Internet as e-documents. This would help save 78 billion dong a year for the postage and 690 hours a year for document deliveries.

Also according to MIC, about 18,000 documents are exchanged among ministerial and government agencies a year. Meanwhile, the figures are 12,700 documents among local authorities, 10,000 documents among political and social organizations, 1000 among local information and communication departments, and 15,800 documents among districts and communes.

As such, there are 19 million documents a year that need to be sent and delivered a year. It takes 130 billion dong a year to forward the documents, and takes 2.5 days on average to exchange documents.

The total time needed to be spent to wait for the documents to go from the senders to the receivers is 1150 million hours a year.

A report of MIC has pointed out that 11.76 percent of the 18 ministries and government agencies use digital signatures. Meanwhile, the proportions are 4.88 percent in the agencies in 43 central provinces and cities, 8.16 percent in the local information and communication departments.

Especially, none of the seven social and political organizations and 100 departments, districts and towns of the provinces listed in the Decision No. 43, has utilized digital signatures for the e-document exchange system.

There are too many problems the institutions are facing to implement the e-document exchange mechanism. They lack technical knowledge, find it difficult to train staff, difficult to integrate the system with the existing information technology infrastructure, lack money to upgrade software products and equipments.

MIC has said that e-documents would be exchanged among 32,000 agencies by 2015, if Vietnam successfully implements eDoc, the information system of managing integrated documents among state agencies.

eDoc is expected to be carried out by MIC in the years from 2012 to 2015.

State agencies have been convinced that eDoc is a very necessary project which would allow saving 50 billion dong a year. State agencies would need just one or two minutes to send documents instead of waiting 2-3 days to get written document deliveries.

Nevertheless, a big problem has arisen: the software solutions applied by different state agencies are not compatible to each other, which makes the e-document exchange impossible.

Some experts keep pessimistic about the implementation of the project, believing that the problem would be unanswered. Meanwhile, others believe that it would cost billions of dong to find the solution.

However, Nguyen Tu Quang, Director of BKAV Company, has affirmed that though this is really a difficult task, but it would be not too costly and not “impossible” as people think.

Quang said that all the agencies using Bkav eOffice software would automatically exchange e-documents among them. Meanwhile, Bkav is ready to provide the standards, so that other software developers can write the modules to connect with Bkav’s system. The modules have the function of reading files in Bkav eOffice system which has been coded according to XML standards.

Quang has affirmed that it would take only one week to program the connection module according to XML standards.

Quang also said that in Lang Son province, Bkav eOffice is ready to “communicate” with other systems.

Thanh Mai