At present, IT skills are scarce. In response to the government policy on IT development, announced by Vietnam s Prime Minister, Vo Van Kiet, in August 1990, under the guidance of the IT development program known as the IT2000 program, management in most organisations has, to date, been preoccupied with IT acquisition. Organisations have not yet invested an appropriate amount for training the staff who are responsible for using and maintaining this new technology. Although Vietnam has not been involved in any major conflict for the last two decades, the culture of secrecy is still present in many organisations. It is often difficult for the public to obtain information which should be available to every citizen, such as legislation, regulations, procedures, statistics, research work, and so on.
Information is power is still the motto in the dealings of many organisations.
Government workers are poorly paid and therefore it is nearly impossible to employ IT staff to maintain and administer facilities. Instead, services need to be introduced in phases to match the local computing infrastructure and skills. Implementing services that the local environment does not have the capacity to use, maintain and administer will put unfair pressure on staff and will result in a waste of valuable resources. Not only is a centralised information server model appropriate in the current environment, it will also adapt well in the future as WAN infrastructure becomes available, since all Internet services are designed for both LAN and WAN environments. Data and information are the essence of all these Internet services, so it is imperative that organisations allocate staff dedicated to gathering, organising, indexing and presenting information to be made available on the servers.