humanitarian.info

Yesterday Kofi Annan proposed what the BBC characterised as ‘radical’ reforms. Naturally, despite the sweeping nature of the reforms, my eyes were drawn to:

III. Information and communications technology

Despite a number of improvements to the United Nations information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure in recent years, the overall system remains fragmented, outdated and underfunded compared to similar large and complex organizations. The lack of any integrated system to store, search and retrieve information generated at the United Nations holds back progress in many other areas. To address this:

8. The post of Chief Information Technology Officer should be created, at the Assistant Secretary-General level, to oversee the creation and implementation of an effective information management strategy.

9-10. An urgent upgrading of Secretariat-wide ICT systems should be undertaken.

Do I ever stop thinking about technology? (Yes, but mainly to think about food.) In this case the mention of ICT is important, because the United Nations (the Secretariat, not the agencies) has been hamstrung by poor ICT – actually, by the weakness of its information management in general. That’s across the board but, from a humanitarian perspective, it’s been particularly problematic for deploying multinational peacekeeping operations.

We’ll see who gets the CTO position (I’m waiting for the phone call, actually) because that’s going to be the key for the entire process – somebody with sufficient authority and knowledge to take the process forward. It’s particularly satisfying because this was one of the recommendations of the ICT4Peace report that I worked on recently.

You can download the report ‘Investing in the United Nations: for a stronger Organization worldwide’ at http://www.un.org/reform/reform7march06.pdf.