Lê Mạnh Hùng, Director General for the Enterprises Development Agency, the Ministry of Planning and Investment. VNS Photo Ly Ly Cao

HÀ NỘI — Digital transformation is a global trend that is affecting every enterprise and organisation. Therefore supporting enterprises in digital solutions is a top priority, especially in the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Ministry of Planning and Investment is cooperating with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to guide Vietnamese enterprises in digital transformation through a new programme during the 2021-2025 period.

Việt Nam News reporter Ly Ly Cao speaks to Lê Mạnh Hùng, Director General for the Enterprises Development Agency, under the Ministry of Planning and Investment, to learn more about the programme.

What is the purpose of the programme after months of working with enterprises?

First, we want to raise awareness and improve the strategic vision for businesses as digital transformation becomes more essential to the development of a company.

Second, we want to support digitisation, starting from business operations, such as administrative and technology processes, financial or human resources management.

We hope to support enterprises to comprehensively transform, so other businesses can replicate those successful lessons.

In the short term, we have focused on the issue of raising awareness for businesses, which is a very important issue. Companies have to be willing to transform and invest to improve capacities and competitiveness in the near future. 

Currently, we are also proposing to have a part of the funding from the state budget to make enterprises be more confident to successfully transform. We hope it will become a part of the economic programme in the future.

We believe that supporting businesses in the digital transformation process is not the task of a particular ministry or department or locality, but of the whole system.

Therefore, all agencies, especially associations and those developing digital platforms and software for businesses, need to support businesses in their transformation.

How will the ministry boost digital transformation in businesses?

After ten months of observing and surveying firms, we found 500 enterprises that are ready for digital transformation. 

We sent experts to 100 enterprises among these to create specific transformation roadmaps.

Currently, we have also developed toolkits to guide businesses in digital transformation to send to 63 provinces.

We also created a website that businesses can easily access to download documents and read assessments about their own operations. Based on that, we now also plan to review and submit a programme to the Prime Minister for the next steps.

In the programme, we will integrate all the content we have collected to avoid duplication between agencies, for example in changing business perceptions and training courses for businesses.

How can we encourage Vietnamese enterprises to apply domestic solutions?

At the moment, the digital transformation solutions developed by Vietnamese enterprises are very diverse and have achieved certain success, which are comparable to foreign solutions, especially as they match the current situations and conditions of Vietnamese companies. 

Therefore, in the programme, we also have a part to promote the development of solutions developed by Vietnamese businesses.

In Decree 80 to implement the law on supporting small and medium enterprises (SMEs), there is also a section related to supporting SMEs to lease or buy digital transformation solutions developed by domestic companies. Thus it also encourages Vietnamese developers to create and implement their solutions.

Our programme will coordinate with one of Việt Nam’s largest and prestigious corporations, VNPT, to launch sessions on digital transformation, as well as introduce local solutions for businesses in different industries.

This is a positive move that provides these developers opportunities to access markets and allows enterprises to improve their products.

Besides technology, what aspects should enterprises consider during the transformation process?

In the process of digital transformation, we believe that technologies or solutions are just tools. The more important factor is a change in thinking in operations and strategy building. This is a very important issue.

We plan to build an online training programme in which we will introduce all the basic knowledge and meaning of the digital transformation process for some selected enterprises so that we can spread knowledge to the Vietnamese business community. — VNS