ORGANIZING AND MANAGING KNOWLEDGE

FOR e-GOVERNMENT

Issues, Practices and Challenges

Zamira Dzhusupova, Adegboyega Ojo and Tomasz Janowski

Centre for Electronic Governance, United Nations University IIST, P.O. Box 3058, Macao, Macau SAR

Keywords: e-Government, Knowledge Management, Public Administration.

Abstract: Electronic Government requires new approaches to the acquisition, management and distribution of

knowledge in the public organizations to transform public service delivery, enable inter-agency cooperation

and support for complex decision making activities by both middle level and senior level public officers.

This paper explains the need for knowledge management (KM) in government, explores knowledge

management requirements for public organizations in the context of electronic government, and describes

available KM solutions. In addition, the paper presents and analyzes examples of national and international

KM initiatives and characterizes the maturity of current KM practices by governments. The paper concludes

by indicating challenges to public sector KM practice and identifying essential elements of a robust KM

framework for e-government.

1 INTRODUCTION

The capability to gather and generate valuable

knowledge from information is a defining feature of

a modern state (Friis 2002). It is increasingly

understood that KM must be conceived as an

integral element of any e-government initiative that

seeks to enable innovation in government, better

support policy and decision making, and transform

public service delivery through inter-organizational

collaboration among government agencies. Despite

the growing awareness by government, there is yet

to emerge robust KM frameworks to guide public

organizations in their KM practices.

The goal of this paper is highlight some core

knowledge management issues for e-government,

examine current KM practices by government and

international organization and discuss possible

elements of a KM framework for e-government to

address shortfalls identified in the current practices.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows:

Section 2 presents a conceptual framework to

underpin the discussion while the methodology for

the study is presented in Section 3. KM solutions for

the public sector are described in Section 4 while

national and international KM initiatives are

presented in Section 5. Discussions and concluding

remarks are provided in Section 6 and 7 respectively.

2 CONCEPRUAL FRAMEWORK

2.1 KM concepts

There are many definitions of knowledge in the

literature: as “a fluid mix of framed experience,

values, contextual information, expert insight and

grounded intuition that provides an environment of

and framework for evaluating and incorporating new

experience and information” (Davenport and Prusak,

1998); and as “information that changes something

or somebody either by becoming grounds for actions

or by making an individual (or an institution)

capable of different or more effective action

(Drucker, P.,1993).

KM could be defined as the effort to

systematically find, organize and make available a

company’s intellectual capital and to foster a culture

of continuous learning and knowledge sharing so

that organizational activities build on what is already

known (Daft, 2001). According to (Snowden, D.

2000), KM is “the identification, optimization, and

active management of intellectual assets, either in

the form of explicit knowledge held in artifacts or as

tacit knowledge possessed by individuals or

communities”. “Knowledge conversion is about the

interactions between explicit and tacit knowledge in

continuous and spiral manner” (Nonaka, I. &

206

Dzhusupova Z., Ojo A. and Janowski T. (2009).

ORGANIZING AND MANAGING KNOWLEDGE FOR e-GOVERNMENT - Issues, Practices and Challenges .

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing, pages 206-211

DOI: 10.5220/0002313402060211

 SciTePress

Takeuchi, H., 1991).

Major components of a typical KM practice

discussed in the literature are:

1) People – consists of the employee of the

organization whose motivation and ability to use

existing organisational knowledge and share

their own experience and lessons learnt

determine the success of KM initiatives

(Davenport, De Long, Beers, 1998).

2) Process – set of activities including organising

and managing knowledge to create, capture,

store, share and utilize (Nona, Takeuchi, 1991,

Alavi and Leiidner, 2001, Becerra-Fernandez,

Gonzalez and Sabherwal’s, 2004, O’dell,

grayson and Essaides, 2003).

3) Technology - specifically IT infrastructure as

primer enabler of successful implementation of

KM projects (Gronlund A., 2002, Zhou Z, 2007,

Yuen, 2007).

4) Sources – include documents, files, databases,

reports within organisations and external

information stocks for explicit knowledge, and

employees for tacit knowledge.

5) Knowledge Repository – the storage for

information and knowledge resources.

6) KM System – a platform equipping managers

with specific tools to create, retrieve store, use

and share knowledge. KM systems and

repositories, as organizational memory systems

(Alavi, M., and Leidner, 1999) make possible to

accumulate, preserve and transfer rapidly and

easily organisational knowledge.

2.2 KM and e-Government

The main objective of e-government is to enable

efficient and effective delivery of public services in

the most accessible and convenient manner for

citizens and business. Different types of services for

various categories of customers such as general

citizenry, taxpayers, pensioners, youth and children,

farmers, entrepreneurs, realtors and visitors, presents

different user knowledge needs. In current e-

government practices, huge amount of information is

available online but the main causes of user

dissatisfaction are out-of-date information, difficult

to find right information and lack of needs

orientation. Consequently, government must develop

commensurate capacity to manage and process the

huge volume of information collected through its

regular interaction with citizens and other

stakeholders. More importantly, it must be able to

exploit the generated knowledge in service delivery

innovation and other core functions or activities of

government.

For internal government activities, e-government

aims to enhance policy and decision making in

different domains – healthcare, education, welfare,

economics, finance, taxation, land management,

defence, culture, foreign and internal affairs,

agriculture, transport and communications which

requires organisation and access to specific

knowledge from different sources.

Complex organizational culture, environment for

isolation in public sector, unwillingness for

collaboration and sharing knowledge among public

workers in e-government activities requires

comprehensive solutions for organising and

managing both explicit knowledge stored in the

agencies and tacit knowledge from civil servants.

3 METHODOLOGY

The objectives of the paper are: (i) to explore KM

requirements for the e-government practice, (ii) to

review cases of national and international KM

initiatives, and (iii) to discuss the major issues

involved in KM practices for e-government.

To achieve these objectives, the paper: identifies

and describes e-government activities requiring KM

support; surveys the state of the art KM solutions;

and maps KM solutions to identified e-government

activities (KM Feature matrix); and analyzing the

presented cases using the feature matrix. Finally, the

current level of KM practice or maturity is assessed.

The cases present two categories – national and

international initiatives. For both categories, we

highlight: (i) major objectives, (ii) solutions applied.

4 KM SOLUTIONS

FOR e-GOVERNMENT

KM can generally support internal workings of

government as well as its relationships with citizens

and other categories of stakeholders – in the area of

service delivery, participatory policy development,

and organizational learning and growth. Specific

KM requirements in these areas include:

R1) Providing access to knowledge for effective

policy formulation accumulated from existing

internal sources.

R2) Supporting decision making activities by

maintaining information on decision patterns,

for instance in cases related to authorization or

certification services.

R3) Enabling effective sharing of experience, ideas

ORGANIZING AND MANAGING KNOWLEDGE FOR e-GOVERNMENT - Issues, Practices and Challenges

207

and know-how among public workers to enable

organisational learning.

R4) Collecting and harnessing citizens’ feedback

and demands to create new knowledge on

services both in contents and delivery.

R5) Ability to harness information provided by

citizens on governmental and non-governmental

platforms as part of public consultation for

policy and decision making.

R6) Analyzing e-service transactions or audit

information as basis for improving service

delivery, for instance through user profiling and

service personalisation.

R7) Analysing good practice, cases and lessons

learnt from other departments within and

outside government to avoid “reinventing

wheel”.

Table 1: KM Feature matrix.

Reqs.

KM Solutions

S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7

9 9

In addressing these requirements, KM solutions

spanning various families of technologies have been

developed. Mainstream KM solutions for e-

government include the following:

S1) Web technology, Intranets and Internet portals

- provide on-line access to information and

knowledge within organization and across

organization boundaries.

S2) Knowledge Repositories and Knowledge Bases

- accumulate knowledge from internal and

external sources for collaborative utilization.

S3) Citizen Relationship Management - helps to

better recognize citizen demands, create citizen

profiles, and serve citizens accordingly.

S4) Data Mining – versatile approach to

knowledge discovery and delivery. It allows

the mining of data on interactions between the

government and citizens or business to

improve decision making, service delivery etc.

S5) Content Management systems - help to

overcome problems of information

accessibility by knowledge workers.

S6) Semantic technologies help to solve the

problems of application and data

interoperability, improved search and

discovery capability.

S7) Virtual communities or Community of Practices

- offer interaction and knowledge exchange

platform by capturing experience of multiple

experts and generate new knowledge to meet

the needs of the community.

5 KM INITIATIVES FOR

e-GOVERNMENT – CASES

This section presents an overview of national and

international KM initiatives - presented in Tables 2

and 3 respectively.

6 DISCUSSION

The reviewed cases indicate that current national

KM initiative tend to focus on building KM

capabilities within government and enabling

organizational and employee learning. International

initiatives largely provide repository of good

practices and learning resources for use by

government institutions.

Frequently used KM technologies include

internet, intranet and portal technologies,

knowledge repository, communities and contents

management solutions. Technologies such as data

mining, semantic technologies and customer

relationship management systems are yet to be

adopted in mainstream KM practice.

In addition to technological solutions highlighted

in this paper, organizational and governance issues

are critical to the success of KM initiative in

government. In particular, the following are

considered imperative for successful KM initiative:

strong leadership and awareness in government

agencies; alignment of KM strategy with the main

policy objectives and e-government, and the

existence of Chief Knowledge Officer role in

government for implementation and coordination of

KM initiatives.

Current practice and research in the domain fall

short in the following aspects: lack of research on

methodology and tools for KM strategy

development and models for alignment with e-

government strategy; poor research and lack of case

studies on KM systems to support decision making

and strategic planning for e-government; lack of

guidelines and toolkits for implementation of KM

practices for e-government; shortage of efficient

mechanisms and incentives for knowledge sharing to

ensure cultural and organizational changes.

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Table 2: Cases - National Initiatives.

Country Objectives Solutions

Australia

Develop KM capability in government:

o KM applications implemented within the Australian

Public Service (APS).

o Case Studies provide tools and techniques for KM

practice in the government agencies and demonstrate

the importance of knowledge to public

organizations and how technology can be used to

support agency performance.

o KM Better Practice Checklist helps agencies

enhance use of knowledge to improve productivity

and service delivery.

o The e-Government Resource Centre provides access

to knowledge on e-government.

o KM case studies stored in the electronic

archive of the Australian Government

Information Management Office (AGIMO)

and published on the portal.

o KM Better Practice Checklist guides

information and knowledge management

within and between agencies and focuses on

non-technical issues.

o The e-Government Resource Centre is the

Victorian Government's repository of e-

government initiatives, strategies, policies,

website standards, best practices and

international research.

Singapore

Build employee capacity and enable organizational

learning

o KM in the public service is linked with the e-

Government strategy and action plans.

o Government KM portal enabled employees to build

capacity on each other's knowledge and create better

documentation of procedure.

o Repository intended to minimize re-work, shorten

the learning curve for employees and ensure

consistency in advice provided to customers and

raise productivity.

o Documentation of processes and capturing of

project lessons upon completion of projects.

o Developing, refining and updating materials

on-line, supported by a KM process and

content management strategy.

o Repository of past work and experience for

enterprise knowledge sharing.

o Portal to transfer best practices, tools and

resources with industry partners, players and

customers.

Korea

Underpin government transformation:

o Integrated Government KM System enables inter-

government knowledge sharing and discussion

aiming at sharing diverse policy information through

e-document management and government work, and

coordinating support for efficient decision-making

o KM system enables various ideas and knowledge

proposed in the process of policy-making to be

recorded and managed.

o The demands of the people analyzed and examined

from various perspectives, and used in policy

development and service delivery.

o Government KM system connects the KM

system and On-nara BPS of each agency

through the Government Knowledge

Management Center.

o Operation manuals, ordinance information,

research data, policy related information,

statistics and training information can also be

searched and utilized within the system.

o The system allows real-time accumulation of

core business knowledge, sharing and

utilization of operations-based administrative

knowledge and major policies and services of

other agencies throughout the government

United

Kingdom

Enable knowledge sharing among departments:

o Knowledge Network (KN) allows officials in all

government departments to share knowledge with

each other and work online with colleagues across

government.

o Knowledge resources for local government explains

the benefits of KM for local government, key steps

and considerations in developing KM strategy in

public sector organization.

o Knowledge Network (KN) provides a cross-

government communications infrastructure

for secure access to 40 dedicated KM

applications, discussion forums, web-based

community sites, integrated workflow

applications and knowledge pools.

o Knowledge recourses related to local

government are available from the portal of

Improvement and Development Agency for

local government

United

States of

America

Develop KM capability for federal agencies:

o Aim is to transfer KM concepts, principles,

standards, practices, processes, strategies, and

technologies across the Federal Government.

o Federal defence-related agencies- Navy, Department

of Defence, Army and Air Force and civilian

organizations - General Services Administration,

Environmental Protection Agency and National

Aeronautics and Space Administration are most

active in KM.

o Government's Chief Knowledge Officer

(CKO) appointed the General Services

Administration (GSA) since 1999.

o Federal Knowledge Management Working

Group under the Federal Chief Information

Officers Council (CIO Council) is an

interagency body.

o Portals, content and document management,

and collaboration systems.

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Table 3: Cases – International Initiatives.

Organization Objectives Solutions

European

Union

Enabling knowledge exchange:

o Innovative KM Infrastructures within

European Public Administration (KIWI)

aims to enhance e-Governance through

utilization of KM methodology in the public

sector and fits with eEurope program.

o E-Governance Enhancement via Knowledge

Management (EG2KM) project enables

project participants to learn and exchange

technological knowhow and experience

from successful European initiatives

through adaptation in the context of

Malaysia to enhance e-governance.

o Web-based and mobile-accessible platform for

acquisition, integration, analysis and sharing of

distributed information and knowledge in

multimedia formats, overcoming the problems

caused by the complex communication and

workflow processes that exist within and between

government departments.

o Within the EG2KM project KM software for public

administrators and KM Best Practices Training

Tool Kit were developed based on the working

model of European best practices, inclusive of

measures, management tools, training and

education components.

United

Nations

Department

of Economic

and Social

Affairs

(UNDESA)

Provisioning knowledge repository for e- and

m-government initiatives:

o United Nations Public Administration

Network (UNPAN) was developed and

managed by the Division for Public

Administration and Development

Management in partnership with relevant

international and regional institutions.

o The United Nations E-Government

Readiness Knowledge Base (UNKB) is a

benchmarking tool for research and analysis

on the state of e-Government.

o The UNKB allows users to easily access,

view, sort and print information from the

UN e-government readiness database.

o Global Knowledge Repository for

Electronic/Mobile Government (EMGKR)

aimed to promote knowledge management,

sharing and collaboration to deliver better

services to their citizens.

o UNPAN is a compendium of e-Government

practices available at the portal contains cases of

innovative e-Government applications from all

geographical regions of the world, with a special

emphasis on those that are adaptable and replicable

by other countries.

o e-Learning initiative Online Training Centre

within UNPAN provides for government officials

from all over the world access to various on-line

courses and learning materials on e-government

and knowledge management in public

organizations.

o EMGKR contains e-government Surveys,

Innovative Practices, ICT Applications,

Documents, News, Events, Directories, Training

and Tools, Thematic Websites, National Policies

and Strategies, Implementation Plans, Legal and

Regulatory Framework, ICT Infrastructure,

Institutional and human resources building,

Monitoring and Evaluation.

United

Nations

University

(UNU)

Cultivating a global Community of Practice

for e-governance

o UNeGov.net Community of Practice

network for e-Governance aims to share

experiences between experts and

practitioners in e-governance from different

countries and regions around the globe.,

develop human capacity, transfer skills and

knowledge.

o Portal developed based on semantic web

technologies provides technical support for

collaborative problem-solving by offering rich

collection of web-based resources - publications,

projects, software, projects, people, organizations,

problem descriptions, solutions for problems.

World Bank

Provisioning knowledge repository on e-

Government:

o KM initiatives aimed to expand knowledge

sharing and help e-Government researchers

and practitioners to build their capacities for

acquiring and applying knowledge relevant

to their core development goals and

communicating online.

o Knowledge repository on e-Government developed

within the InfoDev contains knowledge resources

related to e-Government from various international,

government and non-government organizations

including surveys, strategies, guidelines, toolkits

and case studies

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7 CONCLUSIONS

This paper argues for the need of KM practices as

part of e-governance initiatives. While there are

growing KM solutions in government organizations,

improvement of these practices can only be achieved

through a KM framework for e-government which

addresses beyond technological issues,

organizational and governance challenges.

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