Representatives of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and Microsoft at the signing ceremony of an agreement to promote information technology development. — VNS Photo Vu Hoa

The Department of Information Technology under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE) and Microsoft on Wednesday signed a crucial Memorandum of Understanding.

The agreement will promote collaboration, particularly for Information Technology (IT) development.

Under the agreement, Microsoft will transfer new technologies to improve management efficiency and exploitation of the ministry’s IT systems under its five-year plan of IT application in the 2016-20 period.

Accordingly, the two parties will co-operate on focal areas, including transferring and updating IT trends, developing IT human resources for the ministry and collaborating in consulting for e-government architecture in the environment sector and national database architecture for natural resources and environment.

It would also standardise optimal IT systems to improve management, operational efficiency and ensure information security as well as orienting cloud-based platform and infrastructure development for certain services. The cooperation would support the deployment of new technologies application, particularly in online public services.

Stefan Sjoestroem, vice president for the Public Sector at Microsoft Asia said with the mission to seamlessly support global governments and citizens to do more, Microsoft had endeavoured to build optimal products, infrastructure and smart cloud platforms to create more diversified personal computing experiences.

"Microsoft is very proud of our great journey in supporting the government, local governments and businesses to develop IT capabilities in more than two decades of operation in the Viet Nam market and does believe that when partnering with MONRE, the two parties will accelerate strength and potential and leverage the power of IT to deliver products and services that can better support citizens through the administrative reform," said Stefan.

Nguyen Linh Ngoc, the deputy minister said: "We highly appreciate the strategic cooperation relationship and believe Microsoft’s optimal technology solutions, as well as its global experiences, will help MONRE create a breakthrough in administrative reform, best serve the people and businesses and achieve the objectives of the ministry’s overall administrative reform programme".

Co-operation agreements relating to other fields such as training development have also been established aimed at visionary solutions and assessing the current state of the ministry’s infrastructure to offer extensive reform recommendations and improve citizen services in the fastest way. — VNS