PUBLIC INFORMATION NETWORK AS COMPUTING AND E-GOVERNMENT INFRASTRUCTURE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES1
Aiviet Nguyen2,3
Standing Office, National Steering Committee on ICT of Vietnam and
E-government Architecture and Infrastructure Development Center ABSTRACT
The issues related to Public Internet Access Development at the national scale in developing countries are discussed. Such program must have at least four components: infrastructure, public access points, public information network and training to guarantee the utilization of the invested facilities. Necessary conditions for the successful implementation of each component are also investigated. The heart of this development program is the Public Information Network, which becomes a cooperative environment for government agencies, local governments and businesses to provide the information content services to serve the community. Such a large scale program will significantly pave the way to E-government and push the State Administration Management Computerization activities from their stand-still state. Among the numerous valuable on-line services, the program can facilitate a large grid computing infrastructure to improve the national computing power. Thus, a developing country can have equal opportunities to develop the advanced scientific research projects and services, which require high performance and still not affordable computation facilities.
1. Introduction
Since the early days of Internet, the theoretical studies and small scale pilot projects funded by FAO [1-4] have proven the role of Internet in the socio-economic development in the developing countries. People must have Internet access and know how to use it before they can enjoy the benefits of E-government applications. Trust in Government must be built on the services, which address directly to the people daily life such as health, economy and entertainment. Lacking social awareness and support, the E-government activities cannot resist the internal criticism and can fail.
In developing countries, the economic structure is not mature enough to allow the private sector to build such large and sophisticated content portals like AOL, YAHOO, GOOGLE, On the one hand, the companies are not able to mobilize large amount of investment to build such portals. On the other hand, the market does not appreciate such investment yet. Without contents, there is no incentive for people, especially in rural areas to the frequent use of Internet. So, the government initiatives will have an important role in building such facilities. In fact, government investments are vulnerable to many weaknesses in sustainability and efficiency. Few special measures must be taken to cure these weaknesses. In this paper, the measures worked out for the
1 Invited talk at the 7th Global Forum on Reinventing Government: Building Trust in Government, Vienna, Austria,
June 2007.
2 Deputy Director General, Standing Office, National Steering Committee on ICT; Director, E-Government
Architecture and Infrastructure Development (EGAID) Center.
recently started national project “Internet for Community” (IFC) of Vietnam will be discussed. Hopefully, few lessons can be shared for other developing countries.
2. The four component model of the IFC
In our model, in order to achieve significant effectiveness, the Internet for Community program in developing countries must deploy the following four components in parallel:
• The network infrastructure. • The public access points
• The public information network (PIN) • The training program
This model is depicted in the following figure
2.1 Network Infrastructure
Network Infrastructure is the very basic necessary condition for the Internet access. In the less profitable rural areas, the network service providers are not interested in deploying the Internet access facilities as the market does not justify the investment.
The most important issue is how to choose the appropriate network technology. According to the financial lender JBIC, the narrow band dial-up access via the copper line is perfectly enough for the need of rural areas in Vietnam as the life standard is still low. One local network service provider has proposed ADSL as alternative.
IFC
Network Infrastructure Public access points PIN TrainingHowever, the Project Preparation Unit has decided that the Internet access in rural areas must be broadband. The reason may lie in the fact that the simple farmers do not have enough skills to use the text-based applications. They prefer the visualized and multi-media based applications, which require much higher bandwidth. This situation explains the discontinuous gap in the Internet development: After the Internet has reached the maturity in the metropolitan areas; it takes time for Internet to expand in the rural areas. On the one hand, people in the rural areas cannot afford the broadband Internet, but they are not interested in the dial-up Internet access, which does not have enough bandwidth for media based applications. So, in this period, the Internet access infrastructure in developing countries must be helped by the government.
The special condition in Vietnam allows the optical network will be the preferred choice of technology. In Vietnam, the market is just open for few years and all the service providers are focusing all their efforts to gain market shares in the mobile phone service. By pouring huge capital into the fiber optical networks, three major service providers VNPT, Vietel and EVT have been expanding their national and provincial fiber optical rings to cover all the districts. The total national bandwidth has far exceeded the actual needs. All these networks can be converted to IP network easily and expanded into all the communes.
From economic point of view ADSL is not a good choice in rural areas as from 2009 all the networks in Vietnam will be IP based NGN one and ADSL will be obsolete. In such a short-time, the market in rural areas cannot justify the investment. Based on the geographic conditions, additional technologies like WIMAX, WIFI can also be used.
2.2 The Network of Public Access Points
The public access point is very important for Telecommunication service popularization in rural areas in developing countries, where the PC penetration is still low. Even in advanced countries like US, the public libraries are used as the public Internet access points.
In Vietnam, there exists a network of Communal Post Culture Points (CPCP). Currently almost all the communes in Vietnam, there are a house where people can come to read newspapers and use the basic post and telephone services. However, the quality of CPCP’s is not the same. In many places, the sustainability of the operation of CPCP is questionable as the utilization level is low; the revenue is not enough to pay the staff.
On this issue, the Project Preparation Unit has addressed two following points:
1) The public access points must form a national network. Internet will connect these points. If these points are connected it will become a profitable asset. The network can be used to do retail distribution, utility fee collection, life insurance sale… Gradually, there must be extension service firms who employ the staff at the public access points. So the activity of the staff must be outsourced to the private firms. 2) There must be competitive public access points as CPCP’s are owned by one
company VNPT. Other telecom service providers can choose schools, community learning centers, community health centers and people committee headquarter offices as alternative.
Once in each commune, there is a public access point, based on the local conditions, the local government can decide to build more public access points with a small additional investment. In the initial stage of the project, each public access point should have at least five PC’s, one printer and necessary appliances.
2.3 The Public Information Network (PIN)
As mentioned previously, in developing countries the content portals must be built by the government initiatives. In Vietnam, PIN will be initialized by three portals of three ministries and 5-10 portals of provincial local government. Other ministries and local governments will participate in the next phase of the IFC project.
The central portal is built by Ministry of Post & Telematics, which will provide at least 20 millions free e-mail accounts, upload storage space and multimedia services. Connected to this central portal, the portals of Ministry of Health and Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development will provide online health and rural development services. These services address most urgent needs of people in Vietnam. In the future, the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and other ministries will also participate to serve different needs of people. The portals of provincial local government will also connected to the central portal to become a public information integration place for different Departments in one province. So these portals will form a Public Information Network (PIN) to serve the citizen beside the CPNET, the specialized data network for government to serve the government officers. These two networks will be the basic infrastructure elements of E-government in Vietnam.
So, the Ministries can use this network to send information conveniently. For instance, when one dizzy breaks out in some commune, it would take few weeks to send the paper reports from the commune to the Ministry of Health via many administrative levels of district and province. It will take also few weeks to send back the measure instruction from the Ministry of Health to the provincial Department of Health and then to all the related districts and communes. Via the PIN, the reports and instructions will be sent and posted immediately in 48 hours.
In the future, all 64 provinces and 50 public agencies will have public information portals connected to PIN. Businesses can also connect to this network to provide their services. Essentially, public and private sectors can cooperate in this network to serve the people with initial steps taken by government.
One issue must be addressed is the continuous information provision and maintenance of these portals. Government investments have weaknesses in keeping the invested system in operation effectively. The project preparation unit recommended that parts of these IFC portals’ operation must be outsourced to the firms to provide E-commerce services. Usually, there is no clear boundary between E-government and E-commerce. The combination of the two will help to solve the sustainability of the services.
Training program consists of three components:
i) Training of users: The users in rural areas need training, propaganda in multimedia, success stories to get acquainted to the Internet use. That can be done by short courses, events and frequent onsite help desk advices.
ii) Training of assisting staff: There will be a permanent staff member at each public access point. In addition, volunteers can also participate in the help desk activities. They can be students, social activists and NGO people. They need to be trained to provide good quality services.
iii) Training of the expansion service firms: Without a network, the isolated staff will be difficult to maintain. Business people can be encouraged to form expansion service firms in several communes. The size can start from forming a group of staffs in 10-20 communes. They can provide different services. Government can build the business model and provide training to business men to encourage them to open these firms.
3. E-Government in Vietnam
In Vietnam, the state computerization program in the period of 2001-2005 has terminated without final results. A lot of people perceived it as a failure. There can be many reasons and a lot of lessons can be learned. However, one lesson is obvious: while the government officers don’t support the program as a natural attitude, the public awareness of it is low. Without the social support the program will not be likely a success.
To generate a good image is very essential by providing services. So the good strategy must start from the services but not from the infrastructure like databases and internal applications. Beside the services like the information system for the leaders, the public information network will provide the important necessary condition for E-government in Vietnam. As E-government purpose is to provide online services to people, people must have access and be attracted to the Internet first.
The computerization and deployment of internal government ICT infrastructure can be carried out according to the demand of public service quality improvement.
4. National Grid Computing Platform
One nice thing about the IFC project of Vietnam is that the national computing power can be built due to a newly emerging computing technology paradigm: the Grid computing. This technology has achieved maturity recently and brought a new opportunity for developing
countries to build their national computing powers. The Grid computing is a technology to build virtual supercomputers by utilizing unused resources on connected PC’s.
In the project IFC, there will be many PC’s at the public access points and many servers of PIN. These computers are connected by Internet and the utilization rate is not high except the evening hours. The PC’s at the public access points don’t require much data security. Therefore, these PC’s will provide a huge opportunity to build supercomputers.
These supercomputers can help to improve the content provision on the PIN itself, but can also help other social, economic, technical and scientific areas’ development.
Once the powerful supercomputers can provide software services online, it can also provide cheap PC’s for the people in low income rural areas. This will help to bridge the digital divide.
In Vietnam, the government is trying to build the citizen trust by bringing them direct benefits.
REFERENCES
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[2] Nguyen Ai Viet, Invited Talk at the 1st Global Management of Technology Conference, Seoul National
University, Seoul, Korea, March 2007;
[3] Nguyen Ai Viet, How to involve the farmers to participate in E-government, PC World Series B of the Vietnamese edition, No 77, March 2007, p.14-15;
[4] Nguyen Ai Viet, Computerization of Rural Areas and Internet Development, Invited talk at the Symposium “Ten years of Internet Development in Vietnam”, April 2007;
[5] Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, ISBN 1-55860-475-8;
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