NEWS: Wake up call for public sector

A crisis is emerging, driven by an ageing workforce, widening remuneration gap between the public and private sector, changing expectations of younger workers, and the growing complexity of public policy issues. Ovum’s research director Steve Hodgkinson says this should serve as a wake up call to the governments.

THE next few years are shaping up to be something of a crossroads for public sector knowledge workers. Issues that have sparked the crisis such as an ageing workforce and the growing complexity of public policy issues have been sneaking up on us. But, we may look back on this as the year that government woke up to the need to invest in its own organisational fabric.

One of the symptoms is the progressive down-wasting of document and records management capabilities. The public sector once prided itself on the discipline of its paper records management, with registered filing being an essential element of the training of all public servants.

The coincidence of the ease of electronic document creation, more decentralised organisation models, and the demise of the career public servant has led to a gradual loss of document and records management discipline.

Witness the almost universal failure of document and record management systems in recent years. Even if a system can be said to be operational, the quality of the recording is low. Most information is in practice, stored in an ad hoc manner in thousands of computer hard drives and network folders, application database and content repositories.

This short-term expediency has become a part of public sector culture, reinforced by new workers unaware of public sector document disciplines, staff moving in and out of the public sector, and from one agency to another with a delirious sense of living for the present. Write the brief, deliver the project and move on.

But it’s OK because technology will save us – it’s stored somewhere and we can fire up a search engine to find anything we want. The irony is that, some structure is worse than none at all. Hierarchical folders, partitioned networks, inscrutable document names, multiple document versions, e-mail attachments, etc, defeat searches. We would have been better with no structure at all, one big electronic file with open naming standards like the Internet, then we could at least just Google the lot.

Why do I think that 2008/09 will be any different? Because we are at the beginning of a new generation of tools that caused this problem.

The previous generation of tools were designed to support individual authoring and one-on-one exchanges such as e-mail, the next generation is emerging to support collaboration. Major vendors such as Microsoft and IBM have delivered a new breed of collaboration tools, and new entrants such as Atlassian and Google have launched a new paradigm in Internet-delivered tools.

These tools make it easy and natural to share knowledge. New features, for example, include the ability to create a document in a shared repository, with many authors but only one authoritative version – a “Golden copy” – searchable, secure and archived.

It is no wonder, therefore, that most jurisdictions are agonising this year over their “desktop strategy”. The desktop strategy starts out being a simple renegotiation of an enterprise agreement with Microsoft and/or IBM, and ends up being a fundamental soul search about the nature of knowledge work in the public sector, the processes and practices, the people and their culture and behaviours.

This is a critical business issue for all agencies, and is one that senior executives should take interest in. It is not a technical software procurement issue. Consider this: one of the key determinants of your ability to hire the best and brightest young employees in the near future may well be the quality of your knowledge worker tools and the culture of collaboration that they engender.