Ramon Barquin
heads Barquin
International,
specializing in IT
strategies, data
warehousing,
business
intelligence and
KM. He’s
consulted for the
U.S and other
governments and
many
corporations. He
co-founded The
Data
Warehousing
Institute. His PhD
is from the
Massachusetts
Institute of
Technology (MIT).
Not long ago, I asked a group of people attending one of my KM lectures to raise their hands if they had visited a government website recently. It was fascinating to see the show of hands that went up almost immediately.
Granted, this was in Washington, DC, and several participants were government employees; but in discussing what they were doing online, their activities ranged from simply checking the weather or finding telephone numbers in an agency to more complex tasks like getting directions on applying for a grant or finding whether a book was available in a local library. Furthermore, several of them were actually transacting real business online, such as filing tax returns or paying traffic tickets. The fact is that, with the advent and growth of electronic government (e-government), a big step forward has been taken toward improving the ability of government to serve the governed, its citizens. In effect, many of the above examples of self-service via the internet have moved us closer to Abraham Lincoln’s envisaged government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” But in parallel with e-government comes the need for every public sector agency to organize the bits and bytes it collects from, for and about us. It must arrange that data into content in order to provide citizens with the services they need and do so in an effective and efficient manner. This, to a large degree is being realized, slowly but surely, through KM.
Where do e-government and KM meet?
If you define KM in the simplest and broadest of manners – the process whereby an enterprise uses its collective intelligence to accomplish its objectives – what you find is that almost every significant federal agency has launched one or more KM initiatives over the last few years with the purpose of improving the way they carry out their missions. Some examples of this within the US federal government have received substantial publicity and have already started to yield real value to the public at large. Take the National Housing Locator System (NHLS) launched by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) after the post-Katrina debacle. The NHLS now provides upto- date knowledge, through the internet, about available housing in specific areas of the country. This information is useful not only to the public at large, but also to federal, state and local officials entrusted with responding to emergencies and meeting the needs of victims and refugees. AKO (Army Knowledge Online) has completely revolutionized the way the Army communicates with its troops, employees, contractors and dependents – and how they communicate among themselves – by being its principal window on the world. Troops now have one-stop shopping, even from the battlefield, when it comes to looking at their own personnel records, emailing their family or friends back home, getting the latest news or accessing manuals about how their equipment works. It has been so successful that the other armed services are being brought on board to a joint a Department of Defense-wide portal – Defense Knowledge Online (DKO) – which was modeled on AKO.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), meanwhile, allows anyone to look at data on how well hospitals address the needs of “all their adult patients with certain conditions or procedures” and to compare them institutionally in terms of the quality of care they provide. It is potentially a very valuable tool to inform the public and assist them in selecting the right hospital for their specific situation, as well as to provide incentives for the hospitals themselves to adopt best practices and comply with the highest quality standards.
And then there’s www.usagov.gov, “the official US gateway to all government information.” Administered by the US General Services Administration (GSA), it’s a search engine specifically designed to let the citizen browse through millions of web pages from the federal government, as well as state, local and tribal governments. It allows you to easily find out how to apply for a passport; determine whether you are eligible for social security; file your taxes; shop at government auctions; or search for government statistics, laws or regulations.
The case studies above barely start to tell the story of how KM has truly blossomed throughout the federal government. To these we could add the work that NASA has done with expert locators, such as “expertseeker”; the Federal Aviation Administration’s very successful initiative with communities of practice; the National Library of Medicine’s well-known taxonomy site, MESH (Medical Subject Headings); the Army’s CALL (Center for Army Lessons Learned); or the leadership management dashboards at the US Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative for State Research, Education and Extension Services (CSREES).
Many of these examples continue to build on the partnership between e-government and KM. In fact, e-government and KM walk hand in hand.
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