Digital transformation is being considered as a development strategy that many Vietnamese businesses and organizations are implementing and widely applying in operations. However, is there any way to quantify the actual status of the corporate community, so as to build a specific and effective action strategy?
Difficulties from finance, technology to resources in digital transformation
Mr. Le Hung Cuong, Deputy General Director of FPT Digital, said: “I find that the biggest barrier that businesses face in digital transformation journey is the cost of IT investment and application. According to our experience, after cooperating with many domestic and foreign partners to implement digital transformation, we have found that the investment in IT of Vietnamese enterprises is much lower than that worldwide. Specifically, in the world, the average investment cost for IT is about 2% of revenue, while in Vietnam, this level of investment is much lower than the world standard.
Another barrier is the business habits and behavior of enterprises, which have been established for a long time and are difficult to change. In addition, the internal resources of enterprises have not yet adapted to digital transformation. The internal resources of enterprises are usually very good at doing business, operations, and administration, but do not have much experience in applying digital technology.
In addition to these barriers, businesses also face technological difficulties, especially, enterprises while doing digital transformation will have limitations such as lack of digital technology infrastructure, lack of information about digital technologies, because digital technology is changing everyday. Failure to understand and keep up with information about digital technology trends that are hindering businesses in digital transformation. For businesses that have implemented a partial digital transformation and have developed applications, the new barrier is how to integrate the platforms, so that the software can smoothly connect to each other.
Besides the barriers of resources, finance and technology, there is also a big barrier related to people. It is the lack of commitment from leaders and the participation of staff. Finally, there is the data barrier. Currently, businesses live in the 4.0 era, there is a lot of data, from business data, production to operations, these data are very important to the survival of the business.
Businesses may fear of information leakage, causing their advantage to be lost to competitors. Therefore, many businesses are deploying software quite sporadically, resulting in businesses not having synchronous systems and digital transformation programs that are not optimized in roadmap building and development.
Digital transformation is being considered as a development strategy that many Vietnamese businesses and organizations are implementing and widely applying in operation. However, is there any way to quantify the reality of digital transformation in enterprises, thereby building a specific and effective action strategy?
Because positioning the current level of digital maturity will help businesses navigate the digital transformation journey effectively. Once the enterprise knows where its digital maturity is, based on the business strategy in each phase, the enterprise will develop a strategy and a digital transformation roadmap in accordance with its status quo.
How to measure digital maturity for business?
Ms. Tran Cam Linh, Deputy Head of ICT Department, EVN Hanoi believes that a set of business digital maturity assessments is to clearly determine where the business is, and what work will be carried out in its digital transformation roadmap. Ms. Linh said that this “needs the participation and support of experts on digital transformation”.
Ms. Linh said that at EVN Hanoi, the company first relied on the set of indicators to assess the digital maturity of the Ministry of Information and Communications. After that, EVN Hanoi combined with FPT’s digital transformation experts, synchronized with the company’s business and production strategic goals to build a set of EVN’s own digital maturity assessment indicators, suitable with EVN, ensure that there are steps to implement as well as implement digital transformation projects in the most stable way in EVN Hanoi’s own roadmap.
“If talking about the scale, in my personal opinion, I think there are many “scales” of many consulting companies, and also the thinking of many units. However, in order to have a separate scale for a certain particular business, it is unavailable in my opinion,” shared Linh and said that building a scale for businesses to ensure successful digital transformation, in the process of building must be very flexible, must be in sync with the strategic goals of production and business of the enterprises themselves.
Businesses come from many different industries but lack experience in doing digital transformation for businesses. Therefore, when building a set of indicators to evaluate digital maturity, the Deputy Head of ICT Department of EVN Hanoi said that “it is recommended to collaborate with experts in digital transformation and digital transformation consulting units, which are the unit has experience in evaluating and building a digital transformation roadmap for many different businesses.
They will shorten the implementation time and build a set of indicators or in other words a scale of their own, ensuring that the unit when implementing the digital transformation will have a roadmap and appropriate management steps as well as shortening the time to carry out the deployment process, achieving certain successes in the implementation of the digital transformation”.
In a seminar on leadership in the digital era, Master Ngo Quy Nham, an expert in training and consulting on strategy and human resource management for businesses and large corporations, also said that there is no common answer for all businesses. However, businesses need to have ladders to measure what difficulties and challenges they are facing, and then find ways to overcome them.
That is the ladder of questions such as whether the enterprise has enough financial resources to support the digital transformation, and whether there are human and human resources to implement the roadmap. When you have passed those two steps, businesses will face the question of how to manage the change process to create consensus of the whole team and persistently pursue the passion.
The Ministry of Planning and Investment’s Annual Report on Digital transformation of enterprises 2021 clearly shows that community activities can range from digitizing business and management data of enterprises, applying digital technology to automate. optimize and optimize business processes, management processes, production and business, reporting processes, work coordination in the enterprise until the transformation of the entire business model, creating new values for Business. Digital transformation in enterprises are not simply the introduction of digital technology, but needs to be combined with standardization of business processes and corporate governance processes.
In Vietnam, with the National Digital Transformation Program head to 2025, orientation to 2030, the Ministry of Information and Communications has also issued a framework to assess the digital maturity of businesses. Currently, businesses have a variety of options for different sets of equity assessments, depending on the size of the business, depending on the field of their activities.
Mr. Le Hung Cuong, Deputy General Director of FPT Digital, said that FPT Digital, as a digital transformation consulting firm, we have built a set of assessments of digital maturity based on references from domestic and foreign entities, adjusted to suit businesses, specific situations, and unique culture of Vietnamese enterprises.
Sharing about FPT Digital’s digital maturity assessment suite, Mr. Cuong said that the assessment suite focuses on 6 major aspects of measuring digital maturity, including measuring maturity level of customer, operations, strategy, technology, digital culture and data.
Given the barriers that Vietnamese businesses are currently facing, assessing the level of digital maturity will help businesses measure and locate priorities and strategic goals that are appropriate for them. Not only that, the digital maturity assessment also helps businesses to be better in the process of adjusting goals, or adjusting method in the implementation process, building community programs to achieve the right orientation goals, or changes in business strategy, production and operation management.
