VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnam is meeting some problems when developing e-government. Service providers develop software on different platforms with no common standards, which may makes it impossible to connect relating parts of an e-government.

State management agencies area really the big potential clients for information technology (IT) firms. Therefore, every time when the clients “assign themes,” IT firms would gather their strength to satisfy the requirements of the “VIP clients.”

All state management agencies want the software products which allow to easily deal with the increasingly big amounts of works. Therefore, a lot of IT firms have “jumped into the field,” trying to develop the software pieces they believe can best serve in the office environment.

At least ten solutions in the field have been available on the market, namely NetOffice of SELAB, M-Office of the Dong Nai provincial Science and Technology Department, eDocman Plus of CMC Soft Company, UniOffice of Unitech, and tDoc of CSASS.

As such, there are a lot of solutions for state management agencies’ choice which can meet their different and specific requirements and fit their pockets.

However, the existence of many products turns out to be a problem. The IT solutions provided by some businesses cannot connect and stay incompatible to the solutions and software pieces developed by other companies. Especially, in many cases, the software pieces utilized within the same agencies are not compatible to each other.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communication Nguyen Minh Hong admitted at a recent workshop on e-government development, that the ministry itself is meeting difficulties in connecting eOffice software and NetOffice which was installed before.

Hong said this is really a thorny problem when different agencies are using different office software products. However, it is impossible to force all of them use the same software products, and no one can say what software products are the best.

As a software solution provider, Nguyen Duy Phuoc, Deputy Director of FPT IS has also admitted that there are many different software products in the same fields which serve different requirements of different companies which have different strategic foundations.

Therefore, some problems have arisen. For example, a packaged software product of one IT firm would not be ready for other firm to intervene and connect.

Meanwhile, when asked about the connection capability of their software products, both Nguyen Duy Phuoc from FPT IS and Nguyen Ba Co from BKAV affirmed that the state agencies using the software products developed by them would not have to worry about that.

However, an official of the Hanoi Department Information and Communication, has committed that software firms would not concede the best pieces of the cake to their rivals. In other words, it would not happen that the IT firms which provide solutions for now, would give support to the IT firms which provide solutions in the future.

Therefore, Le Hoang Ngoc, Deputy Director of the Dong Nai Information and Communication Department, has suggested setting up standards for software products. The common standards would be followed by IT firms in developing products, which would allow their software products compatible to each other. If so, the problem would be settled, while state management agencies do not have to waste their money.

Co, agreeing with Ngoc, said that MIC should lay down a policy, requesting software firms to be cooperative to deal with relating issues.

Nguyen Thanh Phuc, a senior official of MIC said frame standards have been set up, but more detailed standards should still be informed for easier implementation.

Source: Buu Dien