Building an Effective E-Government: Insights from the Five-Stage Model and Implications for Vietnam

Digital government constitutes a central pillar of Vietnam’s national digital transformation agenda, aimed at improving transparency, administrative efficiency, and citizen-centred public service delivery. However, the rapid expansion of digital services has not been accompanied by sufficiently robust analytical frameworks for assessing institutional maturity, particularly at the subnational level. This study seeks to evaluate the current maturity of digital government in Vietnam and to identify the legal and institutional constraints that impede the transition from conventional e-government toward an integrated, data-driven digital government model. To achieve these aims, the research adopts a qualitative and comparative approach. It applies the five-stage e-government development model as an analytical framework, combined with systematic analysis of legal instruments, policy documents, and secondary empirical sources. This integrated method enables an assessment of both functional implementation and underlying regulatory capacity. The findings indicate that Vietnam has largely completed the stages of information provision, interaction, and transaction. Nevertheless, progress toward integration remains uneven. Persistent challenges include fragmented data governance, limited interoperability among public agencies, inconsistent legal recognition of electronic records, and weak coordination mechanisms, issues that have been further accentuated by the transition to a two-tier local government system. The study concludes that advancement toward a mature digital government requires not only technological upgrades but also coherent legal reform. Specially, strengthening data governance frameworks, establishing enforceable interoperability standards, and introducing legal performance indicators are essential to ensuring accountability, sustainability, and effective policy implementation in the next phase of digital transformation.