Dr Ali Al Khouri :
THE UAE’s recently unveiled innovation strategy requires all government entities to reduce spending by one per cent and to dedicate the savings to research and innovation projects. This emphasis on innovation is integrally linked to the UAE vision 2021 for developing a competitive knowledge economy on par with the best in the world. Effective and successful knowledge management (KM) is germane to achieving the targets spelt out in the Vision 2021 document. What is knowledge management and what are the pre-requisites to make it effective in the public sector?
The Gartner Group defined KM as follows: “Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.”
Now, how do we translate this definition into concrete action, especially in the public sector? It is now more or less universally recognised that “the wealth of nations in the 21st century is intangible in the form of knowledge assets.” A knowledge economy is “where knowledge, not labour, or raw material or capital, is the key resource of production.” A 2006 World Bank study, which compared the stock of wealth among nations, showed that the biggest difference between wealthy countries and poor countries was intangible capital. While the rich nations had somewhat more physical capital, the majority of their wealth was intangible capital – knowledge, goodwill, and intellectual property assets.
As customers get increasingly habituated to knowledge-oriented services at diminishing costs in the private sector in an ambience of great efficiency, governments can no longer remain marooned in conventional ways of doing things. It is against this backdrop of contemporary history that governments across the world are moving towards e-governance or smart governance. But their success in these ventures is fully dependent on the proper utilisation of their key resources through knowledge management. And that is possible only if they are able to cure themselves of the worst disease that governments are more susceptible than private sector organisations to contract: Organisational Learning Disability.
I guess there are three pre-conditions for effective knowledge management in any sector: the nurturing of a culture of organisational learning, the creation, maintenance and consistent augmentation of knowledge repositories and a flourishing milieu of creativity and innovation within organisations at all levels. All these are easier said than done, particularly in the context of the public sector, since the practical challenges in the face of meeting these three pre-conditions can prove difficult due to four reasons:
1. Direct and indirect resistance from the legion of ‘status-quoists’ within any public sector organisation.
2. Disparities in the technological know-how within diverse government entities and the lack of coordination and unification thereof.
3. The potential mix up between data, information and knowledge as a result of insufficient understanding of this continuum.
4. The cultural barriers to knowledge-sharing and dissemination.
Though difficult, these challenges are not altogether insurmountable, especially in a country like the UAE where change management has been relatively hassle-free in comparison to most other countries in the region. Also important to note in this context is that, unlike many governments, the UAE had long ago internalised the need for speed in government functioning and subsequently redefined and reshaped the modalities of the government – citizen interface in line with the best practices. The element of speed is actually critical in the transition to a competitive knowledge economy, since those left behind in the race for excellence are doomed to perish! It will not be an exaggeration to say that the difference between an old-style government and a new-age government is speed. The speed with which a government learns, innovates and accommodates change enables it to perform well in a highly competitive global economy. Merely having the right technology will not ensure speed.
Where do we stand in terms of our ability to implement knowledge management across the spectrum in the public sector? Scholars argue that there are three stages of knowledge management. The first is – it goes without saying – Information Technology.
Proper deployment of new technology to ensure more effective use of information and knowledge is the key to creating and managing knowledge. The second and the most decisive stage in KM is to build and sustain the human capital capable of running a competitive knowledge economy.
This stage is decisive because if the human capital in an organisation is suffering from organisational learning disability, it is good for nothing, regardless of the educational qualifications and skills it initially brought into the organisation. Though crucial, the third stage is easily manageable if the human capital available is good and the deployment of IT proper: taxonomy and content management.
In the case of the UAE, it is the sphere of the human capital that we need to now focus on. We need to nurture human resources that are brimming with the spirit of creativity and innovation. When our human capital proves equal to their tasks in letter and spirit, we will have nothing to worry about.
( Dr Ali Mohamed Al Khouri is Director General of the Emirates Identity Authority. He has several books and more than 70 research papers to his credit. He is a Special Advisor to the European Union for Single Electronic Identification and Authentication Project in Europe (STORK 2.0) and an Advisory Observer for Secure Identity Alliance in Europe.)
