Businesses need to persevere with digital transformation journey

Vietnamese businesses have made important strides in the digital transformation journey, but they also need to overcome challenges and difficulties in order to perfect and take advantage of opportunities from digital transformation.

Digital transformation has recently become a top keyword among businesses in Vietnam.

Accordingly, the need for digital transformation becomes urgent for businesses to innovate models, gradually shift business activities on digital platforms, find more markets, cut costs and improve operational efficiency, competitiveness, and adaptability to new contexts.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the development of Industry 4.0 has created opportunities and spurred businesses to complete digital transformation and improve productivity and production efficiency, said Nguyen Tan Minh, Deputy General Director of GMO-Z.com Runsystem Joint Stock Company.

However, digital transformation in businesses in Vietnam was still in the early stages, depending on the size and industry, and there had been many challenges that need to be solved, said Minh.

Most businesses were just at the start-up stage, and there were even businesses that are still outside the digital economy, he noted.

Only a few large enterprises and corporations had had made real progress and development in the digital transformation, said Minh.

The annual report on enterprise digital transformation 2022 showed that up to 48.8% of businesses had worked towards digital transformation but were no longer using it because the solution was not suitable or was no longer suitable in the current context of the business.

Sharing with Tap chi Kinh te Vietnam (VnEconomy - Vietnam Economic Times) about the current state of digital transformation of businesses, Tran Tuan Anh, business consulting director in the South of Base.vn, said that the actual number of businesses which did not succeed in digital transformation were up to 70%, or even more.

The figure of more than 48% did not seem positive but reflected reality, he said.

However, this number also showed that the situation of digital transformation in enterprises had been much better than before, he added.

Digital transformation was a long journey and most Vietnamese businesses were still in the early stages of digitisation, said Anh.

At this stage, new software technology helped business divisions and departments to interact and operate effectively remotely, he said.

During the pandemic, technology had played this role well. When the pandemic was over, businesses no longer needed to operate remotely. Enterprises tended to look back at the costs they have had spent to buy software and found it no longer appropriate, he added.

As they were just stopping at the digitisation step and had not yet realised the effects of dataisation and optimisation, said Anh./.