Getting information out of your local council can be frustrating and time-consuming. You can hold for ages on the phone while being passed from one department to the next.
In a move to help make councils capable of providing information efficiently at the first point of contact, the government has launched an ambitious £2.5m knowledge management project.
This latest e-government project is the brainchild of the office of the deputy prime minister. The aim is to try to encourage more joined-up working between councils and public sector agencies. If councils can intelligently structure the information they hold on their computer systems and access it more quickly, the government believes the delivery of public services locally will improve.
The national project team contends that the majority of councils lacks clear and effective knowledge management strategies. "There are no standards for how we manage knowledge effectively internally or between organisations," says Niki Lewis, head of development services for Wiltshire county council, which is leading the project. "If you can keep knowledge together where people can access it quickly, in a format they can use easily, you are going to save time and money."
To encourage more councils to distribute and share knowledge more efficiently, the national project will be creating a series of knowledge management road maps. It will provide standards on implementation and issue toolkits to provide local authorities with specific guidance on developing and managing data.
Wiltshire county council recently carried out a knowledge management project to explore the effects of local rural deprivation. "We now have a much better picture of where we have vulnerable people in Wiltshire," Lewis says. The data is shared across council departments and will influence how services are delivered. She says the council is now looking at ways of making schools, job centres, cash points and broadband technology more accessible in deprived rural areas of Wiltshire.
More generally, the national project team believes effective local knowledge management systems can help protect vulnerable children by, for example, recording domestic accidents that are handled by hospital staff. The project team says social services departments could become more informed and alert to possible cases of child abuse. Systems can also be designed to capture information about youth offenders to try to target services and resources in specific areas to prevent re-offending.
But the art of implementing such systems in local government is notoriously difficult. Knowledge is traditionally associated with power and not everyone wants to share it. Creating a trusting knowledge-sharing culture and motivating council staff to record and pass on data to other departments, let alone citizens, can be a formidable challenge.
About two years ago, the London borough of Merton embarked on an ambitious knowledge management project to integrate the information stored on all its disparate databases. "Information was held on a number of different systems. On each one, the citizen information was held in a different format. When a citizen walked into the council and asked for information, we would struggle to find all the information about that person quickly," explains Gurmel Bansal, head of IT for Merton. The council has since linked systems from social services, education and the housing department. "We're going to end up with a complete list of citizens in a single place. It will mean they are not bounced around the organisation. They will be dealing with a single point of contact and we will have all their information in one place."
Bansal explains that the main hurdles the initiative had to overcome were not technology based. "The challenge has been addressing hearts and minds." Getting individuals within the council's departments to identify relevant data and encouraging them to make it available for sharing were initial sticking points.
Merton's experience is typical. While acknowledging these challenges, the national project team argues that effective local authority systems are essential if community leaders are to become more informed. Making quality information easily accessible is also seen as a way of inspiring confidence in local democracy. "It's about trust and transparency. We're not very good at making available a lot of information we hold. We need to be doing it well and safely," Lewis says.
Knowledge management consultants have welcomed the initiative but fear it could be ineffective if its aims are too generic. "It has to be made relevant to citizens. Nebulous, ill-defined knowledge management systems have little chance of success. They have to be based on pragmatic business decisions," says Ken Fifield, director of consulting for Parity Business Solutions.
As the 2005 deadline approaches, councils are under mounting pressure to provide easier and quicker access to relevant information so they can become more responsive. But the collaboration envisaged by this project requires councils to undergo a fundamental shift in working practices. Many local councils will probably be grappling with knowledge management implementation issues beyond 2005.
