VietNamNet Bridge – State agencies now have the high demand for digitizing their “data warehouses” to help them escape from piles of papers. However, the data digitization services remain slack.

Demand very high

Most government agencies have still been flooded in piles of paper, even though they have been requested to speed up the path of implementing the e-government model with smart offices and shared databases.

Statistics show that up to 80 percent of data and information in Vietnam has been built under the mode of unstructured information. Piles of old documents have been put in offices, because officers dare not ruin important documents which need permanent storage. As a result, it forces officers to sweat and takes them a lot of time to look for necessary documents.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers; for agencies and enterprises in the world, officers have to spend 5-15 percent of their time to read information and spend 50 percent of time to look for documents. Companies have to spend 20 dollars to hire workers every time when they want to rearrange and store documents, 120 dollars when they want to find lost documents, and 220 dollars when they want to rebuild the lost information.

It is clear, that in order to clear out the big volumes of papers and documents while still keeping important information, agencies and enterprises need to digitize database.

Dang Duc Mai, Director of the Informatics and Financial Statistics under the Ministry of Finance, also said that only when Vietnam can build a shared database powerful enough, with the data digitization being the initial move, will it be able to think about the e-government and e-public services.

In fact, many state agencies have begun using data digitizing services. The General Statistics Office (GSO), for example, used the scanning technology in 2009, in the population census.

“GSO used scanner and Kodak’s technology in the population census which helped shorten the time from 18 months to 7 months,” said Nguyen Ngoc Huy, Director of DSG Vietnam, the distributor of Kodak products in Vietnam.

Also according to Huy, some other big clients are using Kodak scanning technology, including the HCM City Taxation Agency and Bao Minh Saigon.

Data digitizing services still slack, why?

Many data digitizing service providers have appeared on the market, including Khue Tu Information Technology Company, with scannermart.vn, and the Vietnam Software Solution and Development Company. The service fees are now at 1000 dong per white and black page, and 2000 dong per color page.

However, it seems that the services still cannot persuade the big clients – state agencies. The key problem here is that the service providers still cannot build confidence on them.

“In many countries, in order to treat old documents, state agencies always hire data digitizing service companies to work for six months or one year. However, this mode remains unpopular in Vietnam,” Huy said.

State agencies still hesitate to use the services because they fear that important information may be leaked.

According to Huy, in other countries, when providing services, companies have to obey the ISO27000 standards in information security and other regulations relating to the information transfer, compressing and encrypting. In many cases, service providers have to send staff and machines to the clients’ companies, where they work under the supervision. The staff cannot use the equipment which allow to copy documents like cameras, mobile phones.

Meanwhile, in Vietnam, there is no such regulation. Therefore, government agencies now tend to purchase equipment and technologies to digitize data themselves. “It will require alot of patience to deal with the volumes of documents arisen from the past,” Huy said.

It seems that dealing with “inventory” documents is now not the priority task of state agencies. This explains why a company which provides data digitizing services, established in 2002, still can’t find any clients who are state agencies.

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