Compliance Toolkit

Time for the Ministry of Information?

Kable

Published: 09 Aug 2005 14:30 BST

Government advisers have called for a minister to take charge of public sector information management

The government needs to overhaul knowledge management practices across the public sector and appoint a minister to be given explicit responsibility for the subject, according to an official advisory body.

Information and knowledge across the public sector is still "barely managed and underexploited", says the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (PSI) in its annual report. It says that the government has failed to take a systematic approach to the capturing and re-use of "intellectual capital" of public sector workers.

"Public bodies should regard record keeping and document management, FoI (Freedom of Information) and the re-use of PSI as a single management challenge. Feedback to our panel is that, on the ground, public sector information management is instead rather fragmented," the report says.

Over the last year, the government has focused on implementing the Freedom of Information Act but largely ignored the need to put together plans for the re-use of PSI.

"Within the public sector insight into and enthusiasm about the reuse of PSI remains minimal. To some extent the government's work on the FoI initiative may well have eclipsed work on the re-use of PSI over the past year."

While government thinking on the re-use of public sector information may have become more coherent, it still "falls short" of a single cost-efficient long-term strategy that had been recommended in previous reports. The panel says it is "disappointed" to report that there are still conflicts over the use of information in government.

"Conflicts were identified between the Treasury's inclination to use public sector information as a source of revenue and the Cabinet Office aspiration of promoting the reuse of public sector information to enhance the knowledge economy and also government services," it says.

Along with the appointment of a knowledge management minister, the panel also recommends that a set of practical guidelines are drawn up to help public bodies handle electronic record keeping, document management FoI and PSI re-use as a single activity.

It wants to see the newly formed Office of Public Sector Information produce a multi media presentation on PSI to be distributed online and on DVD.