Ha Tinh province has emerged as a most favoured destination for foreign investors in recent years and the provincial business community has also made impressive progress. However, there are still difficulties in accessing information, especially using information technology utilities. To learn more about this, Vietnam Business Forum interviewed Mr Nguyen Dinh Phu, Director of Ha Tinh Department of Information and Communication. Thanh Loan reports.
How has the information and communication sector supported local businesses in the past time?
Our provincial leaders are very concerned about the development of local businesses. Chairman Vo Kim Cu has a background in the business environment and he understands the business world. Hence, provincial officials understand that we exist for the sake of business. We must serve them and public administration reform is centred on service to businesses.
For our part, the Department of Information and Communication will give best conditions for businesses, particularly those in Vung Ang and Cau Treo economic zones. As you know, you never lose mobile phone signals, even 3G services, in the upland Cau Treo Economic Zone. A couple of years ago, when the investor of Vung Ang thermal power plant required us to install 100 pairs of telecom cables, we did it immediately.
At present, mobile phone service coverage reaches all residential zones, internet services are very good, and fibre-optic cables reach all communes.
As you said, everything you do is to support businesses, but you are facing difficulties in supplying information to them. What can you comment about this?
We confront certain difficulties in constructing websites to provide information for businesses. As soon as Project 112 was suspended, such websites as
www.hatinh.gov.vn,
www.dhtng.gov.vn,
www.quyphamphapluat.com came to standstill. I asked Mr Vo Kim Cu, who was then vice chairman of the People’s Committee, to restore some websites but we did not have funds to do so. Not until 2006, was the website project restarted. In 2008, we got VND2 billion for the project. Servers and hardware used up above a half of fund and the rest was used for development.
Now, information portals (
www.hatinh.vn or
www.hatinh.gov.vn) have been launched for about two months. We had a joint editorial board for such websites in August. We hope to have a specialised information provider at the service of the public and enterprises. We have not used all functions of the portals, but administrative procedures have been made public there. We have not made available land planning or other sector planning on our websites, because this requires approval of provincial administration and coordination of concerned organs.
So, how has Ha Tinh supported businesses to access information?
Four years ago, we coordinated with the Information Technology Centre to deploy a project in support of information access for businesses (Government-backed Project 191) but the province failed to approach it. Currently, we are carrying out a project to support businesses to apply information technology, use software and train IT personnel.
We have sufficient infrastructure and our main concern is to let businesses know the pre-eminent utilities and features of information technology. In my opinion, the State organs must serve as a driving force for information technology application in businesses. State organs in the province are establishing IT specialist teams to step up the progress of IT application to their operations. Then, information technology application will spread to the entire business community in the province.
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