Projects’ investors will be forced to spend money on IT works The requirement on investors to develop information technology (IT) items in their projects is believed to create a revolution in the management thinking. However, there would be many barriers in the way to implement the idea. Under the Communist Party’s Politburo’s draft resolution on the IT development, all the investment works and projects must include IT development items. The current principle of practicing thrift causes big waste   Dr. Nguyen Nhat Quang, Deputy Chair of Vinasa, the Vietnam Software and Service Association, noted that for a long time, investors have been only trying to create more assets, while they have not thought about how to manage the assets in the most effective way. The investors, when planning to develop a hospital, for example, only estimate the sums of money to be spent on steel, cement or medical equipments, while they don’t intend to spend money on the hospital management system. Only after the directors and the heads of divisions are appointed, will the managers think of computerizing the management system. However, the computerization plans would find it difficult to be implemented, because the spending on the items have not been programmed before. The investors of an overpass may just estimate that they would have to spend some VND100 billion to build the bridge, while they do not think of spending tens of millions of dong more to set up a sensor system which can count the number of vehicles going through the bridge. As a result, the investors know for sure that the bridge can help ease the traffic jam, but they don’t know exactly how many percents the traffic jam has been eased. In other words, as Quang pointed out, the investors cannot measure the efficiency of the investment of VND100 billion on the bridge. As such, the mistakes made at the construction works may be repeated at other works. In this case, the effort of saving tens of millions of dong may cause the waste of billions of dong in other works. IT experts believe that instead of building a series of bridges more to ease the traffic jam, it would be better to spend money on an information system to manage the traffic. Dr. Tran Dinh Thien, Head of the Economics Research Institute, also thinks that the requirement on utilizing IT needs to be legalized. The Politburo would set up the requirements to force development programs’ and investment projects’ developers to think of the solutions to utilizing high technologies to settle the development issues most effectively, the way that the whole world is pursuing. Obstacles exist Dr. Quang, while emphasizing the need of forcing projects’ investors to spend money on IT solutions, admitted that a lot of obstacles would be arising to hinder the implementation of the plan. Regarding the building of the over bridge, Quang said the spending on a vehicle counting system has not been budgeted in any other bridge project. Therefore, only the “brave” investors would be daring enough to think of developing such a system. Meanwhile, Dr. Thien has warned that the application of IT solutions may face the opposition from the groups of interests, who feel their benefits would be damaged. IT solutions would allow to take management in a transparent way, which means no more opportunities for the evildoers to make illicit earnings. Source: Buu Dien