The first post-lunch session I attended was entitled Linking Collaboration, Intranet, Policy, Practice, and Feedback, offered by the United Nations. At the current time, the Peace Operations part of the UN is here to stay, and has between 15-20 operations going on at the moment. There are new people on the ground every 6 months … within the Peace operations … so we need to capture what they are learning, and pass it on to the next platoon. As countries rely on peacekeeping more and more, the UN has to become more professional, and offer greater accountability.

There are various moving pieces: new countries that offer troops and police. There are new and stronger external players, that we have to work with collaboratively. And finally, there’s a great generation change in UN peacekeepers; 80% of the current staff is under 30 years, and are used to newer and better tools.

Some of the key challenges:
– there was a point-to-point exchange of knowledge between people, based on who they knew.
– this wasn’t coming back into the organization.

In the US 2010 vision document, one of the things they see is the need to better manage knowledge.

How to drive this:
– policy and doctrine … drives …
– training … which allows for …
– performance management … which enables …
– learning and evaluation … which feeds back into policy and doctrine … and it goes around again.

Created a library of clear and relevant peacekeeping guidance materials, eg, policies, SOPs, guidelines, manuals

Embraced certain knowledge sharing tools:
– best practices toolbox, to tap into field experiences. Eg, after action reviews, end of assignment reports, handover notes, surveys of practice, and communities of practice.
– the tool being used is SharePoint. This has meant that a much more flexible sharing of knowledge between communities of practice. They were previously email based (using Lotus Notes). The new tool enables people to post queries and responses.
– tried to use a certain approach for writing Trend Reports, based on UN divisions. It didn’t work, for various reasons.

The Intranet solution … key features … the ability to connect into the UN “mother ship”, and access to other peacekeeping missions.

Benefits to the UN, after introducing this new set of solutions in 2006. 85% of people know about the Intranet, there is more sharing, etc.

Lessons Learned
– Centralization of the intranet lead to different missions feeling that they were losing control.
– How much is standardized vs personalized.
– Communities of practice are easy to start, but difficult to maintain. Eg, duplication of documents.
– Translating knowledge into more generalizable trends is more difficult.

Questions
1. Have you looked at putting people out on the field to capture stories?
Answer … yes, but that costs money. Always under budget constraints.

2. Who harvests the knowledge, and who makes the decision as to what goes in?
Answer … you have someone in each mission who decides what goes into the database.