Electronic and Information Technology in Vietnam

Coordination of policies

The real basis for a software industry in Vietnam is manpower. Good vocational training for IT professionals plus advanced specialized training and re-training for programmers and systems analysts will create the necessary conditions for improved IT services and, eventually, a software industry. But highly-skilled and experienced programmers are necessary but not sufficient conditions for such an industrial expansion. What is needed is a mix of policies to complement the educational efforts already discussed in Chapter 10.

If a software industry should emerge in Vietnam in the near future, the government must orchestrate different policies to attain the best possible conditions for growth. Apart from the education and the manpower develop- ment policies presented in Chapter 10, here is a list of some of the policies to be combined:

Capital mobilization: The financial incentives to expand production from IT services to innovative IT development and production should be scrutinized. Most companies in the Vietnamese software business are small and not financially strong enough to expand into advanced software production.
Government procurement: Several ministries and provincial administrations are already customers for local software service companies. The system design and programming tasks required by these public agencies could be used to upgrade skills and advance IT. This will require a more active and technically-informed buyer as well as a sharing between ministries and other institutions of both positive and negative experiences regarding the procurement of domestically produced software.
Foreign vendor involvement: Government could encourage foreign software producers to transfer, much more systematically than today, skills, software methodologies, and experiences to local partners. This could be made a requirement when a public agency is buying hardware and software from foreign vendors.
Capacity building and technology transfer: When negotiating foreign assistance from bilateral and multilateral sources, thegovernment could specify more clearly its goals to develop the country's IT infrastructure. From the Paris donor meeting in 1993, there are clearindications that several leading donors are willing to assist Vietnam more actively than before in its development of information and communications technologies.

In order to sell software products on international markets, Vietnamese soft- ware developers must assure buyers that their software will work with the buyer's system. To do this, developers should test their software with a wide range of computer systems, local area network configurations, and peripheral devices such as printers. By helping to establish facilities for the testing and verification of software products, the Vietnamese government could assist small software developers, interested in selling software internationally.

Such a testing facility would not cost very much for the central govern- ment or even a provincial administration. But it will be too expensive for a small software developer to buy all the equipment necessary to perform this kind of detailed testing and verification.*1 Program developers could rent the facilities by the hour to test their software. The center may also provide expert staff to assist software developers and help correcting problems as they arise.

A center like this could house a range of computer systems (such as 286-, 386-, 486-, and Pentium-based machines as well as a range of Apple computers) running a variety of' operating systems (such as DOS Windows, UNIX, and Apple's System 7), linked together by a variety of networking systems (such as Novell Netware, Windows NT, and AppleTalk), and connected to a variety of printers, scanners, and monitors.

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Last update: May 8th, 1995