humanitarian.info

That’s a trick question. I know quite a lot about peace keeping – working in UNMIK (Kosovo), UNAMA (Afghanistan) and UNMIL (Liberia) will do that for you – although I wouldn’t call myself an expert, more of an engaged observer. So it was interesting yesterday to meet with the information management team at the Best Practices Unit in DPKO, and find out that they’ve got exactly the same problems as the humanitarian organisations that we usually work with.

As well as the challenges of multilingual, multicultural personnel working in distributed and remote locations, they have the additional layer of a command-and-control structure. While command-and-control structures simplify decision-making processes, they actually obstruct knowledge-sharing between staff. The one thing DPKO does have on their side is a massive IT budget, usually devoted to building the communications backbone for both the civilian and military missions. The problem is that technical solutions rarely work for organisational problems that are structural in nature.

This means that information and knowledge management are critical for the success of DPKO missions. This is not necessarily for achieving the objectives of any given mission, which will more often rely on political factors which DPKO has limited control over – but for consistent and coherent approaches to specific activities, such as DDR. While any given mission may or may not be successful, there are a range of such activities which have their own success threshold and knowledge requirement.

One such example came from Liberia, where the first round of DDR in December 2003 was a disaster that nearly got friends of mine killed, undermining confidence both in the international mission and the new government. This was despite the fact that neighbouring Sierra Leone had seen a broadly successful DDR process (admittedly on the third attempt). Although some agencies brought in staff with DDR experience, there were still too many weak points, born largely out of poor workflow structuring, poor management and an unwillingness to acknowledge divergent points of view.

The Best Practices Unit in DPKO are working hard to overcome the knowledge deficits that lead to these problems. While their new website and intranet are a good start, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink (as any fule kno). The key for their success is going to be a more active approach to outreach that connects staff in the field horizontally (i.e. between missions) as well as vertically (i.e. between mission and HQ) – while avoiding undermining the command-and-control structure that makes the military mission viable.

Luckily they’re smart and motivated, so there’s a good chance of success. Maybe I’ll even get a chance to work with them…