Preventing Recurrence of 'Vaccine Reservation System Crash for People in Their 50s'... Improvement of Support System for Small and Medium Software Participation

Large Corporations, Review and Notification of Participation Exemption Projects
Reduced from 45 Days to Within 15 Days

[Asia Economy Reporter Cha Min-young] In July, a serious system outage occurred during the pre-booking of COVID-19 vaccinations for citizens in their 50s. In response to the government's SOS request, LG CNS, Naver Cloud, Kakao, and Bespin Global collaborated to devise joint countermeasures, and the nationwide vaccine reservation system operated normally thereafter. This incident sparked increased calls to improve or abolish the 'Small and Medium Software (SW) Enterprise Participation Support System' to prevent confusion caused by public service system failures.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 5th that it will revise and implement the "Guidelines on Supporting Small and Medium Software Enterprises' Participation in Projects" on the 6th, including a measure to shorten the review and notification period for exceptions allowing large enterprises to participate in nationally urgent software projects to 15 days.

First, according to Article 5, Paragraph 7, in cases where urgent SW procurement is necessary at the national level, such as building vaccine reservation systems due to infectious diseases, the notification of the review results for exceptions to large enterprise participation restrictions must be made within 15 days. Previously, this process took an average of 45 days.

Through Annex 3 and Annex 6, the disclosure of project amounts for software projects where large enterprise participation was previously approved was not made public. This has been improved to disclose project amounts so that businesses can refer to them in advance when considering participation.

The Small and Medium Enterprise Participation Support Exception Project Review Committee will be composed of about nine members, including one chairperson, reducing the number from the previous 15 members. According to Article 13, Paragraphs 2 to 3, the chairperson is elected by drawing lots among the members. Members serve a two-year term with the possibility of one reappointment to prevent long-term tenure issues, and the pool of candidates will be expanded to include various professions.

Introduced in 2004, the Small and Medium SW Enterprise Participation Support System aims to support small and medium enterprises by restricting large enterprises' participation in public SW projects. Since then, improvements have been made, such as allowing large enterprises to participate in new technology fields in 2015 and permitting their participation in public SW projects requiring urgent failure response at the end of last year. However, following incidents like the vaccine reservation system failure this year, there have been calls for further system improvements to prevent confusion caused by public service system failures.

The Ministry of Science and ICT stated, "With this revision, it is expected that in national emergencies such as disasters, the review of large enterprise participation in SW procurement projects will be expedited, enabling smooth responses by national agencies."

Meanwhile, the full text of the notice can be found on the Ministry of Science and ICT website under the 'Laws - Directives, Regulations, Notices' section.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.