Stripped down to its bare essentials, e-government is concerned with leveraging and distributing knowledge more effectively – government-to-citizen (G2C), government-to-business (G2B) and inter-departmentally within government (G2G). As the business of modern government gets more complex and knowledge-intensive, the potential for cost and service benefits associated with streamlining Knowledge Management becomes greater.
Modern Asian government remains paper-based. Handling this paper is very important, because it contains a large amount of knowledge. When you set about establishing a new Knowledge Management system you want to ensure that it adequately captures this paper-based information.
However, digitising paper-based archives and moving tacit knowledge from the minds of experienced staff members into a Knowledge Management system is a time-intensive process, often complicated by people who are reluctant to share what they know in a formal way. Even relatively limited public sector projects can have demanding Knowledge Management requirements.
Unsurprisingly the first wave of Knowledge Management initiatives in Asia’s public sector were low-level tactical projects focused on resolving specific functional challenges.
Examples of this include Australia’s progressive development of its Centrelink citizen service knowledge base and hub, Hong Kong Immigration Department’s deployment of an advanced helpdesk infrastructure and the relatively recent initiative by the Thai government to network the customer-handling functions of 20 ministries, providing basic inter-departmental sharing of citizen information.
As a result of these pathfinding projects, new Knowledge Management initiatives are now much broader in scope, generally eschewing incremental ‘quick-wins’ in favour of more ‘transformational’ outcomes.
A 2004 telephone survey of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) public sector IT managers found that 28 per cent were “actively sponsoring” a Knowledge Management initiative, and of these 78 per cent said that the initiative was an interdepartmental effort. A majority of the survey respondents (62 per cent) expected to be “involved” or “actively sponsoring” a Knowledge Management initiative in 2005. Of these, 36 per cent expected the project to be interdepartmental in nature.
Following on from linking together the customer-handling operations of 20 government departments, the Thai authorities embarked on establishing a government-wide financial information management system to increase public sector productivity. Deputy Prime Minister Suchart Jaovisidha has said that this represents the single most important reform in the Thai bureaucracy for a hundred years.
Thailand’s example is matched by numerous other examples of transformational Knowledge Management projects, such as Brunei Darussalam’s PMOnet initiative [see box: Collaborative government in Brunei Darussalam], Hong Kong’s Office Automation Project, and the United Arab Emirates’ Financial Management Information System.
This gradual increase in the scope of public sector Knowledge Management projects has gone hand-in-hand with greater commitment to instilling Knowledge Management cultures throughout Asian administrations. Hong Kong is a high profile example of an administration that is using knowledge-based working practices to revise the way public services are delivered.
According to Michael Suen, acting Chief Secretary for Administration in Hong Kong, the need to innovate is driving the government to embrace a knowledge-driven work culture: “Public sector reform is not just about cutting costs and tackling deficits; it is about optimising the use of scarce information resources to deliver the best available public services – managing people and processes are key. We are defining a blueprint for these changes and institutional reforms as part of our restructuring.”
This emphasis upon a people-driven approach to successful Knowledge Management is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, it represents a dramatic departure from seeing Knowledge Management purely as a category of technology-driven fixes. Secondly, it has served to focus senior-level attention on the need for process change to support Knowledge Management objectives. It is the latter which is set to have far-reaching consequences for the nature of governance in Asia.
Autor: James Smith
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 30.08.2004
