E-Government in Vietnam: From Vision to Implementation - The Case of State Administrative Management Computerization Project

Despite the considerable investment of the Government of Vietnam in e-government, the outcomes of it are still far below the expectation. This paper aims to assess the current situation of e-government in Vietnam and to investigate the reasons for the modest results of it. Different indicator groups for the measurement of e-government will be applied to access the status of each dimension of e-government as well as the overall performance of e-government in general. The extent to which e-government promoted better governance in Vietnam will be studied as well. In addition, effort was put to apply descriptive stakeholder theory in the interactive perspective of policy implementation to depict the dynamic picture of overall process of e-government policy in Vietnam with the interaction of many stakeholders involved. The findings show that e-government of Vietnam is now at ‘Interactive stage’, with positive results as regards input and environmental indicators. However, the development policy for e-government in Vietnam is quantity-oriented rather than quality-oriented which reflected in the modest result of usage and output indicators and the low extent to which e-government promoted better governance in Vietnam. The investigation of Project 112 pointed out that introducing e-government in Vietnam was an interactive process in which different stakeholders cooperated and struggled with each other for power, budget allocation and financial individual-gain. As a result, the actual outcome of the project and the original objectives were dichotomic. The paper also pointed out many inadequacies of the project, in which the most critical one was the lack of coordination between the e-government project and the broader public administration reform.