Digital transformation, an indispensable strategy for businesses to recover and develop

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Digital transformation – an opportunity for businesses to recover and grow. Photo: T.D

Support the digital transformation policy

Talking at the 2022 HCM City Economic Forum that took place on April 15, Phan Van Mai, Chairman of HCM City People's Committee, said that HCM City has more than 95% small and medium enterprises and 300,000 individual production and business households that are creating vitality for the city's economic life.

Notably, HCM City has overcome the Covid-19 pandemic. Amid the difficult context, digital technology has become an important tool in pandemic prevention, maintenance of supply chains, and production and business activities. This proved the effectiveness of digital transformation.

According to Mai, HCM City prioritizes digital transformation in several areas where people and businesses have large transaction needs to focus on investment, and make fundamental changes, such as land, construction, civil status, business registration, and investment registration.

In particular, implement specific programs and projects directly related to the digital economy, including cooperation on digital transformation with the World Bank in Vietnam; focus on solving interoperability problems, connecting data in the whole city and developing a shared data warehouse; deploy tasks under the program "Research and development of artificial intelligence applications in HCM City in the period of 2020-2030"; and synchronously develop digital infrastructure to serve the digital economy and digital society according to the telecommunications infrastructure development project and the HCM City digital infrastructure development plan for the period of 2020 – 2030.

Additionally, to create an environment for businesses to accelerate digital transformation, Alfonso Garcia Mora, Vice President of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), in charge of the Asia-Pacific region, said that on a global scale, the pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital adoption, transforming development as businesses and citizens embrace technology-enabled solutions in education, healthcare, transportation, and climate.

Therefore, this is the right time for HCM City to focus on digital transformation, making the digital economy a top priority for economic recovery and investment in future competitiveness.

Overcome challenges

Although digital transformation will improve the efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness of businesses and business households in all economic sectors, there are many challenges. Especially human resources, including two aspects: human resources to meet the requirements of digital transformation, and redundant human resources due to not meeting the requirements of digital transformation in each enterprise.

Therefore, the State needs to create motivational policies for businesses to see the benefits and overcome challenges themselves to implement the digital transformation process. Simultaneously, solve arising social problems. The relationship between the state, businesses, and people is the focus of policies in the process of digital transformation and building a digital economy, said Mai.

In a speech at the 2022 Economic Forum of HCM City, Duong Thanh Long, General Director of VNPT Information Technology Company affirmed that digital transformation was an inevitable strategy, the only option for Vietnamese businesses to survive and revive strongly through the pandemic, avoiding lagging behind businesses globally.

Digital transformation not only helps businesses improve labor productivity and internal management efficiency, but also opens up opportunities to reach global customers, shorten service delivery times, create new products and services, and increase revenue with new business models. Only when grasping and making good use of digital transformation opportunities, Vietnamese enterprises in general and businesses in HCM City, in particular, will grow strongly in the future.

Lam Nguyen Hai Long, Chairman of HCM City Informatics Association, said digital transformation was not only an opportunity but also a responsibility and mission of the city's IT businesses in implementing this program with the city.

“Digital transformation has created new industries and business models, governance models. Therefore, if digital transformation is applied to public administration, it will certainly create a public administration model to serve the people in a new way," said Long.

HCM City sets a target that by 2025, the digital economy will account for 25% and by 2030 account for 40% of the city's GRDP; annual labor productivity increase by at least 7%. Particularly in 2022, strive for the digital economy to contribute 15% of the city's GRDP.

According to experts, to achieve this goal, HCM City needs to take four main steps including having policies, infrastructure, services and skills available; at the same time, it is proposed that HCM City should have policies to support companies specializing in data and training human resources in this field. Open data needs to be public to businesses and people, especially small and medium units.